How to get user confirmation in fish shell?

Question

I'm trying to gather user input in a fish shellscript, particularly of the following oft-seen form:

This command will delete some files. Proceed (y/N)?

After some searching around, I am still not sure how to do this cleanly.

Is these a special way of doing this in fish?

Answer 1

The best way I know of is to use the builtin read. If you are using this in multiple places you could create this helper function:

function read_confirm
  while true
    read -l -P 'Do you want to continue? [y/N] ' confirm

    switch $confirm
      case Y y
        return 0
      case '' N n
        return 1
    end
  end
end

and use it like this in your scripts/functions:

if read_confirm
  echo 'Do stuff'
end

See documentation for more options: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/commands.html#read