in shifts we used to run a script where in we need to choose from different options. for example the first part would go like this:
========
menu
========
1)blah
2)blah blah
3)blah blah blah

you have chosen:

then after that a series of multiple choice so on and so forth...what i would like to do is every time i run that script another script/macro will answer those multiple choice for me. is that possible? help me on this.

Put your choices in a file (we'll call it answers.txt), one per line. Ex:


1
3
2
4


Then run your script with the answers piped in:

./mymenu.sh < answers.txt

thanks for the reply PxT. i've that in the office and it worked just fine. but there is one more problem to it. as i have just said before that these scripts are series of multiple questions... it came to a point where there are no choices to make instead i have to press ENTER to choose default where is not included in the multiple choice. how can i put a "carriage return" in the macro? to illustrate:

==========
menu
==========
1)blah
2)blah blah
3)blah blah blah

you have chosen (ENTER=default blah):

thanks for the help but i still need this very much.

You can try hitting Ctrl-V Ctrl-M. You should see a "^M" on the screen... also, you can try typing:
\ctrl-M
On some systems, the \ escapes the < cr >... If neither of those work, try just putting a blank line in...

HTH

hey, i tried your suggestion and it worked fine... it just does not apply for scripts with loops. coz you said that if the selection requires only a carriage return just leave a blank or use ^M or ^V. well the blank thing work it just that if the script that you are trying to run the macro will loop at the end the output will be that it will endlessly try to throw in the carriage return as a result of an endless loop.

to illustrate the script constains the following loop:

until "$quit" = "y"
do

(menu1)
(menu2)
(menu3)
...

done

see my problem? after issuing all the command at the end it will see only carriage return. i only solution i could think of is to quit the application and try to run the script again. anyway, thank you very very much for the reply. i learned a lot from this site. i hope to seek more answers from all of you