Making an Interactive Script

Currently, the script uses the hardcoded value of mysite for the name of the new website. All of our websites won’t have the same name, so we can make the script more flexible by having it prompt us for the directory we want to create.

Using the $ operator

Let’s modify the variable declaration in our script so it uses the read command to prompt for the directory and assign the value for the directory variable. Then, we wrap each use of ${directory} with double quotes so we can support situations where a user might enter a directory name with spaces.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
read -p "Enter the name of the directory to create: " directory
mkdir -p "${directory}"/{images,scripts,styles}
touch "${directory}"/styles/style.css
cat << 'EOF' > "${directory}"/index.html

The read command displays the prompt and pauses the script’s execution. The user can then type the directory they want to create. When they ...