Toward getting your current script working:

1) The ecase statement is in the wrong place. Move it up.

2) You don't need to (shouldn't) put more phonelist in an echo statement. The results of this are certainly unpredictable at best. The output from the more command is captured by the shell and used as the parameter for the echo command. From this perspective, the user might be given a prompt (--more--) before they see any output, or they may never be prompted and the text written by the echo command would scroll by unchecked; either of these cases would be confusing. Further, if your phone book is large, the amount of text placed on the echo command might exceed system limits and cause an error. Simply coding the command and its parameters as a statement in the script is all you need here.

In general, I don't think that it is good form to ever execute a command that naturally expects user input using back ticks or when using the preferred $(command) syntax. These imply that the output from the command is to be saved or passed to another command/function and that human intervention might not be appropriate.

3) You are not reading choice from the user, yet you test for it.

I'd also recommend using double bracketed expressions ([[ expression ]]) as they are much more efficient. All of the modern Bourne derived shells support this syntax. When using this notation, you do need to use == to test for equality.

If you are using Kshell, then you can have the shell test for syntax errors which might help with your debugging. If your script is in the file pb.ksh then this command can be used to test for syntax issues:

Code:

ksh -n pb.ksh

When I ran your original script through Kshell this way the output was this:

Code:

$ ksh -n  pb.ksh
t16.ksh: syntax error at line 16: `[' unexpected

Which immediately pointed out that the esac was misplaced.


Im not a bash user per se, but I believe that bash has a similar option/feature to syntax check if you prefer to use bash.

Hope this helps get you going again.