Book Image

Mastering Bash

By : Giorgio Zarrelli
Book Image

Mastering Bash

By: Giorgio Zarrelli

Overview of this book

System administration is an everyday effort that involves a lot of tedious tasks, and devious pits. Knowing your environment is the key to unleashing the most powerful solution that will make your life easy as an administrator, and show you the path to new heights. Bash is your Swiss army knife to set up your working or home environment as you want, when you want. This book will enable you to customize your system step by step, making your own real, virtual, home out of it. The journey will take you swiftly through the basis of the shell programming in Bash to more interesting and challenging tasks. You will be introduced to one of the most famous open source monitoring systems—Nagios, and write complex programs with it in any languages. You’ll see how to perform checks on your sites and applications. Moving on, you’ll discover how to write your own daemons so you can create your services and take advantage of inter-process communication to let your scripts talk to each other. So, despite these being everyday tasks, you’ll have a lot of fun on the way. By the end of the book, you will have gained advanced knowledge of Bash that will help you automate routine tasks and manage your systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Time to give our client a menu

In this chapter, we are looking at different ways to play with loops in order to work on the pieces of information the user provides us with. From a simple menu, we moved onto something fancier and better looking; and now, it is time to take a step further and have a look at the select construct whose task is to let us create menu in an effortless way. Its syntax is similar to the for construct:

select placeholder [in list]
do
command_1
command_2
command_n
done

So, as we can see, this construct is very similar to for and sports a list, which gets expanded on the standard error in a series of elements preceded by a number. If we omit the in list part, the list gets constructed from the positional parameters given on the command line, such as if we used [in $@]. Once the elements in the list are printed, a PS3 prompt is shown and a line from the stdin is...