Shell Script\, display directory listing to option input / trying to select two files to compare

Question

I am trying to have the user select two files from a numbered list which is derived from a directory listing and will eventually be turned into a variable. Im just a network engineer trying to automate combining some show output commands from a switch.

This is what I have that is not working:

echo "Please Select the Show interface status file"
select FILE1 in *;
echo "Please Select the Show Vlan file"
select FILE2 in *;

do

When I am able to select files from the directory, I plan to "cat $FILE1 > file1" & "cat $FILE2 > file2" then I will combine them.

Answer 1

Each select statement needs to be completed before moving on to the next one. A select statement is actually a special type of loop.

Let's say that I have a set of files, examplefile01 through examplefile10. If I had a script like this:

select f in example*; do
  echo "You selected $f"
  break
done

It would look like this in execution:

$ ./470595.sh
1) examplefile01    4) examplefile04   7) examplefile07  10) examplefile10
2) examplefile02    5) examplefile05   8) examplefile08
3) examplefile03    6) examplefile06   9) examplefile09
#? 5
You selected examplefile05

The break statement is important, because otherwise the select statement would loop back to presenting the options again.

So in your case, you might want something like:

echo "Please Select the Show interface status file"
select FILE1 in *; do
    cat "$FILE1" >> outputfile1
    break
done

echo "Please Select the Show Vlan file"
select FILE2 in *; do
    cat "$FILE2" >> outputfile2
    break
done

You can also get a little clever and eschew the echo statements by modifying the prompt provided by the select statement by setting PS3:

PS3="Please Select the Show interface status file )"
select FILE1 in *; do
    cat "$FILE1" >> outputfile1
    break
done

PS3="Please Select the Show Vlan file )"
select FILE2 in *; do
    cat "$FILE2" >> outputfile2
    break
done

Also, since you're planning on combining the files, it might be easier to do that at the same time as the final selection:

PS3="Please Select the Show interface status file )"
select FILE1 in *; do
    break
done

PS3="Please Select the Show Vlan file )"
select FILE2 in *; do
    cat "$FILE1" "$FILE2" > outputfile
    break
done

Answer 2

Thank you for the help, I was able to get it working. Its not pretty but it does what I want

#Combine Show Vlan and Show interface status Function
combinevlanshint()
{
cd $shintstatvlan
clear
#Ask for Hostname 
echo "Names can not contain spaces:"
echo " "
echo "Please enter the Hostname"
read "hostname" 
clear
echo "Please Select the Show interface status file"
select FILE1 in *; do
    cat "$FILE1" > $shintstatvlan/file1
    break
done
echo "Please Select the Show Vlan file"
select FILE2 in *; do
    cat "$FILE2" > $shintstatvlan/file2
    break
    done

echo "You picked $FILE1 and $FILE2 , These files will now be combined. Press any key to continue"
read -n 1



     cat $FILE1 > file1
     cat $FILE2 > file2
sed 's/[[:space:]]*,[[:space:]]*/,/g' file1 > file1.$$ && awk -F, 'FNR==NR{f2[$1]=$2;next} FNR==1{print $0, "VLAN Name";next} {print $0,($5 in f2)?f2[$5]:"NA"}' OFS=, file2 file1.$$ > file3 && rm file1.$$
mv file3 
mv --backup=t $shintstatvlan/file3 $outputdir/$hostname.shintstatwvlans.txt
rm $shintstatvlan/file1 $shintstatvlan/file2
break
clear
mainmenu
}