I need help, I am only new to shell but an advanced programmer in other languages, I have to write this all in script though.

Problem 1. I need to modify the output from ls -l to be more "user friendly", I would like to replace the r,w,x with read,write,exe. Was thinking I could write it to a temporary file, go through that and replace the approaite ones, then output them back to the screen.

Is there a way of using sed to catch a string?

Problem 2. I need to control the output from dmesg to only output the first ten lines.

Any help with these problems would be really great.

For the 1. I am not sure if your output will be more user friendly as the ls lines will be very long like :

ls -l ~
read write execute|read- execute|read - execute Desktop/
read-write-execute|read- -|read- - file
...
On a 80 columns terminal, this sort of output does not render well

for the 2:
dmesg | head -10

Thanks for that part 2, really does the job for what I need. Basically my brief for the ls -l command is to make it more user friendly, have you any ideas on ways to achieve this. I thought if you could but like a table head above the ls -l command that might help

r = read
w = write
x = execute
- = no access
|USR|GRP|OTR| |File Name|
drwx rwx -wx joebloggs

that was my idea, do you feel this would be user friendly enough?

-10 is redundant here, as head by default is displaying the first 10 lines anyway. is enough.