dialog show a menu with input from a file

Question

In my script i created a file that i want to use as an input source for dialog program, in order to populate the menu dialog. In the file every line contain a number and a menu title. ``` INPUT="" rm result while read LINE do case $LINE in '/ >'*|---*|'/ > '*) continue;; esac # echo "1 $LINE " echo -n " 1 \"$LINE\"" >>result done < tmpfile #printf "%s " $INPUT DIALOG --menu "Latest news " 20 50 30 `cat result` ``` DIALOG is a function, and this is the source: ``` DIALOG () { dialog --backtitle "$TITLE" "$@" return $? } ``` Every menu item for dialog need an identifie (in my example is the number) and a label (between double quotes ", if it is more than one word). The problem is that even if the file content has the correct format: ``` 1 "item number 1" 2 "item number 2" ... ``` The dialog command doesn't recognize the \" as a label delimiter, but it consider it as a part of the string, resulting in a messed up menu, where i have a menu voice for every word. but if i try to copy and pa…

Accepted Answer

You can use an array to keep the results, then use proper quoting to send it to `dialog`:

```
ar=()
while read n s ; do
    ar+=($n "$s")
done < result
dialog  --menu "Latest news " 20 50 30 "${ar[@]}"
```

You probably do not have to create a temp file at all, you can populate the array right ahead.

dialog show a menu with input from a file

Solution

Problem