cdialog for Win

Important: read also valuable information about cdialog.exe's latest news and feedbacks from users.

The story

I had never seen cdialog running native under Windows, so I decided to take sources and compile them with MinGW. The following steps were performed:

  • I downloaded sources from ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dialog/dialog_1.1-20100119.orig.tar.gz (now link is broken because Debian removed that file, but you can still see more recent packages at ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dialog) 
  • I then "adapted" (i.e. messed it up considerably) the source code to get a successful compilation. I had to delete some lines of code that were throwing errors, in the hope that those lines weren't crucial. A complete list of all the changes I did can be found in this diff file. If you need to recompile the sources by yourself, don't forget to add a curses library in the library path of your compiler; I used the pdcurses library
  • the produced binary is dialog.exe; it may be useful to improve your oldstyle batch files, by adding messageboxes, multiple selection dialogs etc.

How to use cdialog

  • learn the basic options by typing dialog --help | more
  • look at the examples in the /examples subdirectory of the sources
  • look at the example and picture below

C:...> dir dialog.exe
11/04/2010  23.36           804.165 dialog.exe

C:...> dialog --calendar "Please select your birth date" 3 36 14 3 1979 2>date.txt

C:...> type date.txt
23/03/1979

Downloads