sed & awk, 2nd Edition

A Menu-Based Command Generator

In this section, we look at a general use of the system( ) and getline functions to implement a menu-based command generator. The object of this program is to give unsophisticated users a simple way to execute long or complex UNIX commands. A menu is used to prompt the user with a description of the task to be performed, allowing the user to choose by number any selection of the menu to execute.

This program is designed as a kind of interpreter that reads from a file the descriptions that appear in the menu and the actual command lines that are executed. That way, multiple menu-command files can be used, and they can be easily modified by awk-less users without changing the program.

The format of a menu-command file contains the menu title as the first line in the file. Subsequent lines contain two fields: the first is the description of the action to be performed and the second is the command line that performs it. An example is shown below:

$ cat uucp_commands
UUCP Status Menu
Look at files in PUBDIR:find /var/spool/uucppublic -print
Look at recent status in LOGFILE:tail /var/spool/uucp/LOGFILE
Look for lock files:ls /var/spool/uucp/*.LCK

The first step in implementing the menu-based command generator is to read the menu-command file. We read the first line of this file and assign it to a variable named title. The rest of the lines contain two fields and are read into two arrays, one for the menu items and one for the commands to be executed. A