31FLOW CONTROL: BRANCHING WITH CASE
In this chapter, we will continue our look at flow control. In Chapter 28, we constructed some simple menus and built the logic used to act on a user’s selection. To do this, we used a series of if commands to identify which of the possible choices had been selected. This type of logical construct appears frequently in programs—so much so that many programming languages (including the shell) provide a special flow control mechanism for multiple-choice decisions.
The case Command
In bash, the multiple-choice compound command is called case. It has the following syntax.
case word in [pattern [| pattern ...
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