Yes or No in Bash Script

Here is a way to do this with an array.

#!/bin/bash questions=( "How to see apache config file" "Command for listing processes" "My hovercraft is full of eels" ) for((q=0; q<${#questions[@]}; q++)); do echo "Execute question $q?" select result in Yes No; do case $result in Yes) echo "${questions[q]}";; esac break done done 

Using select for this seems rather clumsy, though. Perhaps just replace it with

 read -p "Execute question $q? " -r result case $result in [Yy]*) echo "${questions[q]}";; esac 

Having just a list of questions still seems weird. With Bash 5+ you could have an associative array, or you could have a parallel array with the same indices with answers to the questions. But keeping each question and answer pair together in the source would make the most sense. Maybe loop over questions and answers and assign every other one to an answers array, and only increment the index when you have read a pair?

pairs=( "How to see Apache config file" "cat /etc/httpd.conf" "Command for listing processes" "ps" "My hovercraft is full of what?" "eels" ) questions=() answers=() for((i=0; i<=${#pairs[@]}/2; ++i)); do questions+=("${pairs[i*2]}") answers+=("${pairs[1+i*2]}") done 

This ends up with two copies of everything, so if you are really strapped for memory, maybe refactor to just a for loop over the strings and get rid of the pairs array which is only useful during initialization.

Use an array of questions and loop over it, like this:

#!/bin/bash n=1 questions=( 'How to see apache config file' 'Command for listing processes' ) check_user_input(){ read -p "y/n " input case $input in [Yy]*) return 0;; [Nn]*) return 1;; *) check_user_input;; esac } for question in "${questions[@]}"; { echo "Execute question $n" check_user_input && echo "$question" ((n++)) } 

Here is a straight forward example. Play with it.

#!/bin/bash echo "Type 'y' for yes, 'n' to skip or 'q' to quit and press Enter!" for((i=1; i < 101; ++i)); do echo 'Execute question '$i while read user_input; do if [[ "$user_input" = 'q' ]]; then break 2 elif [[ "$user_input" = 'n' ]]; then break elif [[ $i -eq 1 ]]; then echo 'How to see apache config file?' break 2 # Change from "break 2" to "break" for the next question. elif [[ $i -eq 2 ]]; then echo 'Command for listing processes.' break 2 # Change from "break 2" to "break" for the next question. else echo "Wrong input: $user_input" echo "Type 'y' for yes, 'n' to skip or 'q' to quit and press Enter!" fi done done echo 'Finished'