I'm trying to think of various scenarios to further my knowledge of scripting (which is scarce). I've found some online but they are literally a little bit *too* beginner to keep my interest.

Does anyone have any interesting ideas?

Here is one for you, give it a shot; write random figures to a file, the file name must be specified in args, you should test that a file name is specified, you should also test that the file doesn't already exist. The file size will be a random length, between 0 and 94 blocks.

You should expand it further by allowing the user to specify in args what they want the file to be filled with, including nul characters and specifically specified characters.

Further expansion; make the script fail if not run as root.

- Thats a script I give as a suggestion for students

Well, firstly I'd bookmark and flick through
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

that should pique your curiosity and you'd want to make sure you understand it all. (No need to memorize it all of course).
Secondly, start reading through the Programming Forum and try to solve as many qns as possible.
For research/study purposes, it doesn't matter if you go back through old qns, you'll still learn a lot by looking at other peoples answers.

Thanks guys.

I'm stumped on this little thing here

[ != 0 ]

What is that telling me? I know [ -ne 0 ] and [ -eq 0 ], can't find any documentation on the exclamation though

man test

[ ! "$i" -eq "0" ] is the same than [ "$i" -ne "0" ]

! negates any predicate.

Do you have any programming experience? Even asking my wife, we struggled to find too many examples where ! didn't mean 'not'. If you don't have any experience, you ought to go back to those *too* beginner exercises you seemed to oppose

James,

I already figured that out - I'm back to the beer bottle program :-D

I have no experience, I'm teaching myself and for some reason I have this addiction to doing it in bash that I can't curb.

Thanks everyone for your help