SOLVED: Asking a question during install

[John G. Heim]

I've asked a lot of questions lately so I thought I'd share my perl 
subroutine for asking a question during a FAI install. It validates the 
answer versus a list of valid answers and it times out after 30 seconds 
taking the default as the answer. It takes 3 parms:
1. The question.
2. A pointer  to an associative array listing valid choices.
3. Default answer. So you might call it like this:

my $answer = &askQuestion ('Language?', {G => 'German', E => 'English'}, 
'E');


sub askQuestion
 {
 my $question = shift;
 my $choices = shift;
 my $default = shift;
 my $answer = '';
  if ( open CONSOLE, "</dev/console")
  {
  while (not defined ($choices->{$answer}))
   {
   eval
    {
 local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm clock restart" };
 alarm 30;
 printf STDERR "$question\n" . join (", ", map ($_ . "=" . $choices->{$_}, 
keys %$choices)) . "[$default] ";
 $answer = <CONSOLE>;
 chomp($answer);
 alarm 0;
 };
   $answer = $default unless ($answer);
   } # elihw
  close (CONSOLE);
  } # fi
 return $answer;
 } # bus AskQuestion