whiptail on ubuntu

whiptail is a subset of dialog’s functionality on ubuntu, notably, it’s already installed. I used it to wrap some tests which are executed automatically by non-technical people.

The major trick for getting whiptail menu results as variables: redirect stderr to stdout (via fd 3).
FOO=$(whiptail --menu A foo B bar 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3)
if [[ $FOO = "" ]]; then
echo cancelled; exit 1
# etc


A more complete (but still truncated) example:
#!/bin/bash
# This is a subset