Comments on Adding a Simple GUI to Linux shell scripts with kdialog
Shell scripts are incredibly useful things. They allow you to do something as basic as creating an easy command to replace a more difficult one with lots of flags, to batching up many complex commands to run from a cron job. They’re great because you can quickly fire them off in your favorite terminal, but in some cases they require you to remember specific combinations of flags or options. If you find yourself in this situation, you can add some simple GUI dialogs to help you speed your way through the task at hand.
5 Comment(s)
Comments
For people on Linux that are more in the gnome realm, there is zenity, or better yet: yadIn my install, pulling in kde-baseapps-bin results in hundreds of megabytes of packages...
There is already a lot of alternatives: dialog, whiptail, gdialog (zenity), kdialog... Have a look there: How do I prompt in a Linux shell script? 5 answer
This has to be the most idiotic article I have read all week. Having a dependency to the whole kde base system just to display a few simple dialogs is absolutely horrifyingly stupid if you aren't using KDE already.
Install kde-baseapps just to run kdialog? As others note, there are several robust alternatives that will allow one to avoid falling into the pit of noxious practices and thinking such as:
'This will likely result in a sizable installation, as other KDE libraries and packages will be installed along with it. But hey, hard drive space is cheap, right?'
Yeah, hard drive space is cheap, but that doesn't mean I want to clutter it up with hundreds of MB of otherwise useless code.
I thought this was a Linux-related article, not one advocating the M$ bloatware approach...
I'm already running the NEON desktop packages and adding a simple "apt install kdialog" installed ZERO extra packages so obviously this article applies to folks already running some kind of KDE desktop. As noted in the comments, use an alternative dialog system if you don't want the KDE "bloat". Please, leave the "I don't want KDE dependencies" negativity at the front door and respect that some people do use KDE and really appreciate an article like this.