Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

The select Statement (pdksh)

You use the select statement to generate a menu list if you are writing a shell program that expects input from the user online. The format of the select statement is as follows:

select  item in itemlistdo    StatementsDone

itemlist is optional. If it isn’t provided, the system iterates through the item entries one at a time. If itemlist is provided, however, the system iterates for each entry in itemlist and the current value of itemlist is assigned to item for each iteration, which then can be used as part of the statements being executed.

If you want to write a menu that gives the user a choice of picking a Continue or a Finish, you can write the following shell program:

#!/bin/kshselect  item in Continue Finish ...