How to record user input to a file in a shell script? [closed]

Question

My friend was showing me a program in shell script where he made where he would open the program, it would ask a question, he would type an answer. Then it would close but whatever he typed as the answer would be transferred to a text document.

Answer 1

I'd suggest starting with something like

#!/bin/bash

read -p "Your question here: "

echo "$REPLY" > somefile

You can read more about bash's read command either from the manual page (man bash) or by typing help read at the shell prompt.

Answer 2

If the response doesn't need to be tested , it is sufficient to do it in just one line:

$ echo "Enter blah" && cat > output.txt
Enter blah
blah 
# Press Ctrl+D to stop recording stuff into file
$ cat output.txt
blah

What happens here is we use echo to output text on screen. && simply is boolean operator and means "if previous command was successful, execute second one". && is not important here, and ; could be used just as well. cat > output.txt is the fun part - with no file specified, cat will read stdin stream by default ( which in this case is your keyboard ) and parrot it out to stdout. What > does is send stdout stream to file. So basically, we've rewired data streams to go from keyboard to file, instead of keyboard to terminal screen , in just a few characters of text.

This doesn't necessarily need to be done in shell alone, it can be done with other tools, like python:

$ python -c 'import sys;print("Say hello");f=open("output.txt","w");[f.write(l) for l in sys.stdin.readlines()];f.close()'       
Say hello
Hello AskUbuntu
# press Ctrl+D
$ cat output.txt
Hello AskUbuntu

Answer 3

#/bin/bash
#Here you can ask your question just edit "Your Question".
echo "Your Question"
#"read" this command reads input from user and store in text what ever 
#like word "answer" used here as example.
read answer
#"$answer" this input was taken by user from "read"  and stored in word answer . echo prints all words stored in $answer to file like anything.txt or any extention you can use.  
echo $answer > any_file.txt