How to use select to choose from x files, that contain lists, needed to run set of commands against, in this case curl

Question

I have about 100 lists of URLs used for health checking (200, 300,400,500) but cannot figure out the terminology to ask the question. In advance, I apologize.

I want to use a list to choose on of the identified list files, containing the URLS, and then run curl against it to get my results. Currently, Im stumped.

If I call out the file implicitly, I can get things to work. If I use a select againt the listing of files to choose from, I can get that file and do a simple 'cat' of the result and get the URL's in it successfully.

I cannot seem to do the select, get the file into its variable and then make the next move to the loop to run thru those items in the chosen file successfully.

Im embarrased that its making a mess out of my hair.

works

select f in *.lst; do echo $f
done

Does not work in any way or format

select f in *.lst;
for i in (cat $f); do curl $i
done

 bash -x ./test.sh 
+ select f in '*.lst'
1) availability_health_check.lst      3) facility_service_health_check.lst
2) explorer_health_check.lst          4) mobile_service_health_check.lst
#? 1
+ echo availability_health_check.lst
availability_health_check.lst

Answer 1

Your code is missing a do and done for your select statement. I believe you want something like this:

select f in *.lst; do
        for i in $(cat $f); do
                curl "$i"
        done
done

This will allow you to select a file, then curl is ran on each line in the selected file. Add an exit 0 after the for loop if want the script to exit after you've selected a file.