Question

I want to display a numbered menu from a shell script (#!/bin/sh). Currently I use

echo "choice1
choice2
choice3
choice4
"

To output the menu. Now I want to add a number prefix to each line so the result will look like:

1) choice1
2) choice2
3) choice3
4) choice4
...

How can I do this without having to manually prefix each line with a number? I’m thinking I want to iterate over the variable line by line and concatenate the line number and output it to a new variable.

Answer 1

If you are using bash, I’d recommend using the select built-in for these kind of tasks.

Here are some examples.