Fluxbox menu entry that prompts for some input

Question

How do I ask 'which man file would you like to open?' in one command from the commandline, which will also open xterm at the same time. This is needed for a fluxbox menu item.

For it to be a fluxbox menu item, it must fulfil this format

[exec] (Which man page do you want to read?) {read -p 'which man file would you like to open? '; xterm -e man "$REPLY"}

where

• [exec] - look out its an executable command
• (Question) - title
• {xterm -e man tmux} - command with this syntax

Answer 1

You can open a man page in an xterm window using the following command:

$ xterm -e "man xterm"

This will results in the man page for xterm being opened in its own window.

                 

If you'd like to make it a single command that will do this you could create an alias like so:

$ alias gman='xterm -e man \!$'

And then use it like this:

$ gman xterm

Prompting for a man page

You could use the GUI toolkit zenity to open a dialog box asking for a man page to be typed in, then take what was typed in and use the above method to open the respective man page.

$ zenity --entry --text "Enter man page name:"

Resulting in this dialog being displayed:

                                                 

A complete example

Putting the above together you could do something like this:

$ xterm -e man $(zenity --entry --text "Enter man page name:")

                                                 

Answer 2

This will prompt for a manpage and open it in xterm:

read -p 'which man file would you like to open? '
xterm -e man "$REPLY"

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This will run the prompt in a new instance of xterm:

xterm -e sh -c 'read -p "which man file would you like to open? " && man "$REPLY"'