Create dynamical from files in directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello

I putting together a menu script for some processing operations and I want to do the following, was googling for some time, but can figure the following out.

Im in a folder lets say /input_files

I want to list the files something like the following, each file is assigned a number, now If I put the corresponding file number to read, I want that the number will point to the file name

#!/bin/bash
clear
#set -x
echo " TEST"
files=$(ls -l | grep ^- |  awk '{print $NF}')
i='0'
for file in $files
do
i=`expr $i + 1`
echo $i")"  $file
done
echo -e "\n Choose file: "
read VARIABLE_WITH_FILE NUMBER
cat $FILE_NAME

 TEST
1) list_menu.sh
2) one
3) test_file
4) two

 Choose file:
If I press number 3, I want the script to cat test_file, when pressing 1, cat list_menu.sh

Thank you

2

Try something like:

select f in $(ls -p | grep -v /)
do
  cat "$f"
done

This would only work if the are no files with spaces or newlines in the directory which may be OK from the command line..

A more robust solution - using bash arrays - would be:

files=(*)
for ((i=0; i<${#files[@]}; i++))
do
  [ -f "${files}" ] || unset files      # remove directory entries that are not plain files
done

select f in "${files[@]}"; 
do 
  cat "$f"
done
1 Like
3

Thank you so much that select is awesome,

I think the files can be handled much easier -

ls -l | egrep ^- | egrep -v "*sh" | awk '{print $NF}'

added the PS3 variable + break since after one file I cant to take that value into the next processing.

nevertheless thank you so much

4

You're welcome. Yes but it has the same problem, that files with spaces or newlines are not handled properly..