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 text within the loop asking the user for their choice of command. We will clear the screen before the menu is loaded each time and an additional read prompt will appear after the execution of the desired command.

This allows the user to read the output from the...