Case statement doesn't cope with values greater than 9? 1

[milage]

Hi,

I have this case statement for which the options change depending on the number of subdirectories in a directory.

However, lets say there happen to be 15 subdirectories. This causes the case statement to echo "Invalid choice" if the user enters any values except or 1 and 5, similarly if there are 18 directories it echos "invalid choice" if the user enters any values except for 1 and 8 etc etc.

How can I stop this happening and get it to echo the choice for the range 1-14 or 1-18 etc?

Here's the code:
---------------------------------------------------------------

echo "Choose the client"
CLIENTS=`ls /support/patches`
I=0;
for client in $CLIENTS
do
I=`expr $I + 1`
echo "$I) $client"
done

while true
do
read ANS
echo $ANS
case $ANS in
[1-$I]) echo "Choose option $ANS
break
;;
*) echo "Invalid choice, please enter a valid choice"
;;
esac
done

-----

cheers

Rob

 

[bigoldbulldog]

why not use:

if [ $ANS -ge 0 -a $ANS -le $I ]; then
echo "Choose option $ANS
break
else
echo "Invalid choice, please enter a valid choice"
fi

regular expressions in case are a pain and dynamic are as much a pain. If you stay with case then create the regular expression outside the case statement

e.g. range 1-5
RE="[12345]"
case ...
$RE) ...
...

p.s. why a re-choose message on success? Cheers,
ND

bigoldbulldog@hotmail.com

 

[milage]

Hi,

thanks for that excellent suggestion, a nice quick a simple solution thats what I like, now why couldn't I have thought of that!

btw, i'm not actually re-choosing on success, there is a whole bunch of code that happens, I just removed it all and replace it with and echo to make the code sample smaller.

thanks again

Rob