How to ask questions with a bash script and make them a variable?

Question

I want to make a bash script that symlink files for me instead of doing this manually. In my mind the workflow would be something like this :

Question 1 : What is the path of the file/folder to be the source ? ( user input the source )

Question 2 : What is the path of the destination ? ( user input destination )

And then I would take this input and make it variable $SOURCE and $DESTINATION

Then I would just run something like :

mkdir -p $DESTINATION 
ln -s "$SOURCE" "$DESTINATION"

The script should forget the variables after every run, and also run in loop until user decides to quit it.

Also if a user input a destination that ends with a different filename as is often desired, how I can mkdir the directory but exclude the file name?

Like /root/files/1 and I want to symlink it to /var/files/2. Being "2" just a different name for file "1". How can I make my script that smart?

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm just new to this world and this script is going to be one of the most complex I ever wrote.

Answer 1

It seems that you want something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

while :; do

  read -r -p 'Source: ' source
  read -r -p 'Destination: ' destination

  [[ $destination != */* ]] || mkdir -p -- "${destination%/*}" &&
    ln -s -- "${source}" "${destination}"

  read -r -p 'Exit? (type "e" to exit): '
  [[ "${REPLY}" == 'e' ]] && break

done

Example:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ ls -l
total 0
$ touch file
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 a a 0 sep 11 03:13 file
$ my_script.sh
Source: ./file
Destination: ./dir/file_copy_1
Exit? (type "e" to exit): 
Source: ./file
Destination: ./dir/file_copy_2
Exit? (type "e" to exit): e
$ ls -l ./dir
total 2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 a a 6 sep 11 03:15 file_copy_1 -> ./file
lrwxrwxrwx 1 a a 6 sep 11 03:15 file_copy_2 -> ./file

I couldn't completely understand your question about mkdiring the directory excluding the filename (sorry, I'm not a native english speaker), so I just improvised that part, but if you give me more examples about what you exactly want maybe I could help you.