case

Bash builtin construct for creating multi-choice conditional statements. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-case.

• Match a variable against string literals to decide which command to run:

case $tocount in words) wc -w README; ;; lines) wc -l README; ;; esac

• Combine patterns with |, use * as a fallback pattern:

case $tocount in [wW]|words) wc -w README; ;; [lL]|lines) wc -l README; ;; *) echo "what?"; ;; esac