Using case statements

Rather than using multiple elif statements, a case statement may provide a simpler mechanism when evaluations are made on a single expression.

The basic layout of a case statement is listed as follows, using pseudocode:

case expression in 
 case1)  
  statement1 
  statement2 
 ;; 
 case2) 
  statement1 
  statement2 
 ;; 
 *) 
  statement1 
 ;; 
esac 

The statement layout that we see is not dissimilar to the switch statements that exist in other languages. In bash, we can use the case statement to test for simple values, such as strings or integers. Case statements can cater for a wide range of letters, such as [a-f] or a through to f, but they cannot easily deal with integer ranges such as [1-20].

The case statement will first expand the expression and then it will try to match it with each item in turn. When a match is found, all the statements are executed...