Display backslash-n in dialog?

[Moray Henderson]

Hi,

 

Is there a nice way to display the literal sequence ‘\n’ in dialog?  I'm writing a confirmation box for deleting a set of directories from a Windows perspective:

 

  dialog --yesno "This will delete:\n - I:\\$CHOICE\n - P:\\$CHOICE\nContinue?" 8 40

 

It works perfectly until the directory name in $CHOICE begins with ‘n’.  The best I have been able to come up with is to separate the backslash and $CHOICE with a space-backspace sequence:

 

dialog --yesno $'This will delete:\n - I:\\ \b'"$CHOICE"$'\n - P:\\ \b'"$CHOICE"$'\nContinue?' 8 40

 

It works after a fashion, but the code is ugly and so is the output:

 

 

I’m using CentOS 5.6, dialog Version: 1.0-20051107, writing a program to help manage Samba services (hence the need for Windows-style paths).

 

 

Moray.

“To err is human; to purr, feline.”