Mastering Linux Shell Scripting - Second Edition

Creating operator menus

We can provide a menu to the Linux operators who need limited functionality from the shell and do not want to learn the details of command-line use. We can use their login script to launch a menu for them. This menu will provide a list of command selections to choose from. The menu will loop until the user chooses to exit from the menu. We can create a new $HOME/bin/menu.sh script; the basis of the menu loop will be the following:

while true 
do 
...... 
done 

The loop we have created here is infinite. The true command will always return true and loop continuously; however, we can provide a loop control mechanism to allow the user to leave the menu. To start building the structure of the menu, we will need to echo some ...