How to automate prompts during apt upgrades in bash? [closed]

Question

I am running several Raspberry Pi 4 on Bookworm. On these, I have a bash file as follows:

sudo apt -y update read -t 600 -p "Pausing 10 minutes between Update and Upgrade" sudo apt -y upgrade read -t 600 -p "Pausing 10 minutes between Upgrade and AutoRemove" sudo apt -y autoremove

Sometimes I get the below screen:

I also run this as a cron job (once a quarter) that calls the above script, but it fails when run via the cron. How can I recognize that this GUI prompt is up and input the right answer?

Important Note: This doesn't happen always, so I want it to recognize when it happens and only then provide the correct input.

The site you're looking for is either Unix & Linux or Raspberry Pi. This is off-topic here, as it's not a programming question. — David Makogon
– David Makogon, Commented Sep 7, 2024 at 13:28
If you really want to ask the question, how do I write a bash script to respond to these GUI prompts, you'll have better luck asking with a use case where that's a good idea in the first place. For package management, to be honest, it's almost certainly not a good idea because you would need to foresee any possible interactive question that might come up, and that can change as stuff gets released, which is why package managers offer a non-interactive variant that just won't ask any questions. — joanis
– joanis, Commented Sep 7, 2024 at 14:01
You're coming at this from the wrong direction. The tool you're running has a noninteractive mode so there's no reason to automate input to it at all; just run it in the mode where it doesn't start the TUI (which isn't a GUI) in the first place. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Sep 7, 2024 at 14:34
askubuntu.com/questions/556385/… is the first hit searching "apt noninteractive" and it fits with how I remember solving this problem myself in the past. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Sep 7, 2024 at 16:15

Charles Duffy · Accepted Answer · 2024-09-07 22:29:06Z

For the specific case of dpkg frontends such as apt, it's built to be able to disable interactive prompts altogether -- you don't need to automate the prompts, you can just turn them off.

Export the environment variable DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive while you run apt, and you'll get no more interactive prompts; if you need to assert specific settings, you can set them noninteractively with utilities from debconf-utils -- see its documentation.

Concretely:

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt -y update read -t 600 -p "Pausing 10 minutes between Update and Upgrade" sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt -y upgrade read -t 600 -p "Pausing 10 minutes between Upgrade and AutoRemove" sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt -y autoremove

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