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

The case Statement

You use the case statement to execute statements depending on a discrete value or a range of values matching the specified variable. In most cases, you can use a case statement instead of an if statement if you have a large number of conditions.

The format of a case statement for pdksh and bash is as follows:

case str in   str1 | str2)      Statements;;   str3|str4)      Statements;;   *)      Statements;;esac

You can specify a number of discrete values—such as str1, str2, and so on—for each condition, or you can specify a value with a wildcard. The last condition should be an asterisk (*) and is executed if none of the other conditions are met. For each of the specified conditions, all the associated statements until the double ...