Hi!

I need to determin the most efficient way to do something (rather simple, I thought).

I'm currently echo(ing) a series of menu options, and reading the command input as the number associated with the entry. What I need to do is when the option 1 is selected, that it references a list and then fills in the variable the correct way.

Example - if I have a friendly list of server names like:

1. Server 1
2. Server 2
(...and so on)

However, in the command that I am envoking in the background it needs to be ipaddress : port. I don't want the IP address as the name on the menu, but it does need to be passed for the process to work correctly.

How would I do this?

Thanks!

I would have a function that uses a case statement, it takes the option argument and returns the various associated elements with that option in a strict order....

get_menu()
{
case "$1" in
1 )
echo "option one"
echo "flim"
echo "flam"
;;
2 )
echo "option two"
echo "foo"
echo "bar"
* )
return 1;
esac
}

then you could do

get_menu 1 | while read N ....

then you have also centralised all the behaviour of the menu

Hmm...not sure I know what to do with that Any more details? I can't say I've ever done anything like that before...

Is this easier?

PS3="choose:"
select server in  server1 server2;do
	case $server in
		server1)printf "You choose $REPLY : use your ip_1:port here\n";;
		server2)printf "You choose $REPLY : use your ip_2:port here\n";;
		*)printf "Invalid option\n";break;;
	esac
done

Yes, it does! That makes more sense as it's apparent I'm no scripting expert.

Thank you both for your replies!

Ok guys, I think I'm missing something here.

I was using radoulov's example and had gotten much further.

I see two things happening that I need to change.

(1) When I select an option from the list, it simply outputs the $REPLY value back to the console. The user doesnt need to see this value, but instead it needs to be passed as a variable to the command to be executed.

(2) Once I select an option from the list, it just keeps prompting me for another option to select and doesn't move on to complete the script. Am I missing an end, or done, or something?