Ugly hack to use AppleScript to present a dialog from a bash script, and get their choice.

I am reposting this from my old blog because a coworker ended up needing this. This has only been tested on 10.4, though nothing in it is all that special.

I was trying to slap a prettier interface onto a bash script for a client. I only bothered to use an AppleScript instead of just sending it to Growl because I needed them to be able to make a choice that I’m going to act on in my script. Even if it was just for display, I didn’t particularly want them to have to install Growl just for my little script.

This is ugly because I had to use a temporary file to store the AppleScript to display the dialog. It is also ugly because we can’t just display the dialog – we get an error message if we try – but we can tell another application to display the dialog. I picked System Events because it’s always running anyway.

This method also allows us to use a program-generated message instead of something static.

And just for the heck of it, I stuff the name of the button the user clicks into a variable, in case you want to use this snippet to display choices for the user.


#! /bin/bash

msg="Giant cracks appeared in the earth’s surface!"

# use $$ here so that the process ID of this script is part of the file name.
# this makes it a lot harder to accidentally step on another instance
# of the script that’s trying to also display something to the user.

tf=/tmp/ziggurat$$

# note that there should be 3 lines between EOF and EOF, in
# in case this is mangled by blogger

cat>$tf <<EOF
tell application "System Events"
display dialog "$msg" with icon stop buttons {"Foo", "Bar", "OK"} default button "OK"
end tell
EOF

foo=`osascript $tf | awk -F":" ’{print $2}’`

echo "foo: $foo"

# don’t forget to trash the temporary file when we’re done with it.
rm $tf