whiptail(1) is a lightweight replacement for dialog(1), to provide dialog boxes for shell scripts. It is built on the newt windowing library rather than the ncurses library, allowing it to be smaller in embedded enviroments such as installers, rescue disks, etc. whiptail is designed to be drop-in compatible with dialog, but has less features: some dialog boxes are not implemented, such as tailbox, timebox, calendarbox, etc. Please see the whiptail(1) man page for details. Regards, Alastair McKinstry, 2003-06-08.