The case loop

Up until now, we have dealt with basic commands that allow us to do things we need when trying to write a script, such as looping, branching, breaking, and continuing program flow. A case loop, the topic of this recipe, is not strictly necessary, since the logic behind it can be created using a multi-nested group of individual if commands. The reason we are even mentioning this is simply because case is something that we are going to use a lot in our scripts, and the alternative of using if statements is both difficult to write and read, and complicated to debug.

Getting ready

One could simply say that a case loop or case statement is just another way of writing multiple if then else tests. Case is not something that can be used in place of a normal if statement, but there is a common situation in which a case statement makes our lives a lot less complicated and our scripts much easier to debug and understand. But before we go into that, we need to understand a...