Shell Programming and Scripting

hi,
im just starting with scripting , i have de following situation
im doing a search in a data folder with egrep

egrep -i "title.regu." `find . -name "*.dat"`

the result is :

./20080816212245/index.dat:title Regular Expressions
./20080811212216/index.dat:title Reguliere Expressies Tutorial
./20080815173529/index.dat:title Reguliere Expressies handout

Now i want to create a simple menu of the result, so it's possible to choose from
above results.( so for above result, you get a menu of 3 options), then when i choose
1 for example (the first outcoming result), is must go to folder called 20080816212245, (this is de first of the result, then in that folder is file index.html,
(so cd 20080816212245 then nano index.html)

Is there an easy way to do this?.
ps im have no knowledge of sed e.t.. can this be done without?

thank a lot.

egrep -i "title.regu." `find . -name "*.dat"` > output

cat $output | while read line
do

dir=$( echo $line | cut -d / f2)

cd dir

# you will reach in directory and can execute whatever you want then.

done

Try this as well.

Code:

select pick in $(egrep -i "title.regu." $(find . -name "*.dat")); do
  echo "$pick"
done

The $(...) construct is equivalent to `...` but it's easier to read and easier to nest.

Prat007 could avoid the use of Useless Cats and temporary files. Also I don't get the benefit of the cd -- basically all Unix commands can cope with a complete file name (and there's a dash missing before the -f option in the cut, but let's not dwell on that):

Code:

egrep -i "title.regu." `find . -name "*.dat"` |
while read line; do
  echo "$line"
done

This doesn't produce a menu, though, it just loops over the matches.

Hi

both thanks, last days im playing arround with this solutions, and
it seems very good, one last issue im facing with is the space in the description i generate a seperate menu option, so i mean Reguliere expressie tutorial will generate 3 option's 1) Reguliere , 2) Expressie , 3) tutorial.
Is this easy to handle and generate 1) Reguliere expressie tutorial instead.

Thanks again
regards

Try this.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS='
'
select pick in $(... whatever commands ...); do
  echo "$pick"
done
IFS=$OLDIFS

By manipulating $IFS we tell the shell to use different rules for splitting up a list of arguments; setting IFS to a newline means split on newlines. You could put other characters, such as colon, in there as well. (In your case I imagine you would want to ditch everything before the first colon with cut -d: -f2- instead, though.)

Although era's solution works perfectly there is also another way of creating menus using the dialog command with the --menu option.

dialog is a program which uses the ncurses API to create dialog boxes for shell scripts.

Here's an example of what you can achieve:

Code:

dialog --menu "Hello world\nstuff stuff stuff" 12 50 12 "Menu1" "desc1" "Menu2" "desc2" "Menu3" "desc3" "Menu4" "desc4"

There are lots of example uses of dialog.