How to add line number prefix to multi-line variable in shell scripting?

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.

Zsolt Botykai · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-11 22:05:33Z

4

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

Here are some examples.

answered Sep 11, 2012 at 22:05

Zsolt Botykai

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William Pursell · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-11 22:19:28Z

2

select is probably the way to go, but you could also do:

echo "$string" | nl -ba -s') '

answered Sep 11, 2012 at 22:19

William Pursell

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