Sometimes we may wish to take different paths based upon a variable matching a series of patterns. We could use a series of if and elif statements but that would soon grow to be unwieldily. Fortunately there is a case statement which can make things cleaner. It's a little hard to explain so here are some examples to illustrate:

case <variable> in
<pattern 1>)
	<commands>
	;;
<pattern 2>)
	<other commands>
	;;
esac

#!/bin/bash
# case example
case $1 in
	start)
		echo starting
		;;
	stop)
		echo stoping
		;;
	restart)
		echo restarting
		;;
	*)
		echo don\'t know
	;;
esac

#!/bin/bash
# Print a message about disk useage.
space_free=$( df -h | awk '{ print $5 }' | sort -n | tail -n 1 | sed 's/%//' )
case $space_free in
	[1-5]*)
		echo Plenty of disk space available
		;;
	[6-7]*)
		echo There could be a problem in the near future
		;;
	8*)
		echo Maybe we should look at clearing out old files
		;;
	9*)
		echo We could have a serious problem on our hands soon
		;;
	*)
		echo Something is not quite right here
		;;
esac