Shell Programming and Scripting

I did an assignment for sh scripting back in november, and I found it quite fun learning. I would like to retain this knowledge as I'm pretty sure it was my only scripting assignment, from now on in my programming course we won't be doing any scripting apart from the typical makefile scripts. The assignment was for the user to have a operations file with a list of commands for a supermarket. It wasn't very complicated but some typical commands were:
add new record, delete, modify, display all products, search for a product.
products were displayed in a format of :
isle number (5 width right justified)| brand (30 width left justified)| product(30 width left justified)

Program was to make use of command line arguments, and take a operations file as input and a database file as output, it was to parse up to any number of arguments and display typical errors and usage information, if no database file was specified then one was created in a typical directory structure:
prog
| |
data code

I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for an project around this kind of skill level or a little harder that I might be able to attempt. Thanks for your help
Edit: and would like it in bourne sh/bash format ( or doable in sh ), as I'm not familiar with other types of scripting yet.

100 view and not a single idea , Bump!

I would suggest you to select Perl for these kind of requirements.

Why not look through the posts here and pick out ones you find of interest and see if you can write your own solutions. Then you can compare them to other solutions posted and see how you are doing

why? bourne shell accomplishes this easily. It was the assignment I did back in November. printf for field widths, functions for each task typically using grep. Test for all command line args, and a while loop to process the file.

Please refrain from bumping up posts - this is not allowed here.

If you need something more complex than a supermarket you could take something from the real world that is more complex than a supermarket - maybe simulate a complex thing from nature.
Or something technical: Try to write a job scheduler that offers different reports etc., parallel processing etc. that offers remote job handling by simulating whatever.

Why not take your supermarket application, and try to optimize it. Use 'timex' to measure your improvements.