51 yes/no prompts and ~20 free-text ones, of which about six actually need a human.
The line drawn is "a question with a default answers itself; a question with no
possible default still asks", so it stays attended without being a conversation.
Half of it already existed: ASSUME_YES=1 was implemented and honoured by confirm()
in both scripts, returning each question's OWN default — so a "do the thing you
asked for" question goes yes and a genuine extra goes no. --unattended sets it.
The new part is menu_answer(), for the eight numbered menus. It sets the variable
EMPTY rather than passing a default in, because every menu already consumes its
choice as `${CHOICE:-<n>}` — the default lives next to the options it selects
between, which is the right place, and a second copy in the helper could drift from
the one the prompt advertises. Verified all eight consume that way before touching
them. `read <<<''` rather than eval or `declare -g`, which is bash 4.2+ and rules
out the bash 3.2 macOS still ships.
officer-setup's ask_required takes its default too, except where there is none — the
owning account on a machine machine-setup never ran on, where a guess would install
as the wrong user.
STILL ASKS, deliberately: the username; the Tailscale control plane, login server
and auth key; the git identity; and an SSH public key when the account has none.
That last one is a trap I nearly walked into — on a fresh VPS KEY_COUNT==0 forces
ADD_KEY=true with no confirm, and the menu's default is "[1] paste a public key",
which then prompts with no default at all. Auto-answering that menu would hang or
fail, so it is excluded by name. adduser also still asks for a password; that is
the tool, not us.
Two pre-existing bugs fixed on the way: machine-setup's sudo re-exec passed "$@"
after `shift` had emptied it, so --only and --reask stopped existing the moment it
escalated — same bug as officer-setup had. And UNATTENDED/ASSUME_YES are named in
all three sudo lists, because env_reset would otherwise drop the flag at
escalation, which is now the fourth variable lost that way.
Verified: bash -n on five files, --help on all three, and menu_answer + confirm
under the flag showing a menu resolving to its default and a no-default confirm
correctly answering no.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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