UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Is there a way i can take 'lets say the etc/group file' and arange the group names into a selectable numeric menu eg;

1) root:0
2) other:1
3) bin:2
4) sys:3
.....
.....
.....
and so on

then

GROUP="group name of users selection"

i have tried for over an hour searching on google but i have no idea what i'm trying to find!

I found a post on this the other day while looking for something else but didn't need it at the time and now i cant find it again.

This seems to happen alot.

Thanks in advance guys.

Code:

select group in `cut -d: -f1,3 /etc/group`; do
  echo ${group%:*}
done

I'm sorry i have only been at this for a week and i have no idea what you mean.

Hey, era, that's way cool. I didn't know that nifty command was around. Anyway, You can set PS3 to be a more "meaningful" prompt, like this:

Code:

PS3="Enter a number above, then hit CTRL-D > "

Then run Era's code. I believe that's what you asked for.

Hey thatnks for that guys works good.

It didn't work the first time i tried it then i worked out the selcet is only in the ksh and i was running sh.

thanks again

I'm trying to understand the modification of the

${group%:*}

to reverse it so i only the the ID portion of the select instead of the group name.

It's documented in your shell's manual page. ${var#pattern} returns $var with pattern removed from the beginning, ${var%pattern} returns $var with pattern removed from the end. The pattern can contain shell wildcards (?, [abc], *) but is otherwise just a string.