hi everyone.. i'm a noob on shell programming and am doing some scripting.. but i really have a lot of trouble getting started.. i need to write a simple shell scripting.. it goes something like this..

for eg if i press '1', it'll show processes for the current user namely
- process id
- parent process id
- user name
- command
- CPU utilization (in desc)
- process start time
- process status

and output it to a file named whatever.txt..

if i press '2' it reports those processes selected in (1) with CPU utilization not equal to 0

if i press '3' it displays all the child processes (with process id, command) of the user specified process

if i press '4' it kills all the process with specified program(command) name on behalf of the user

can all these be done..? argh.. really need a headstart on how to do these.. any help/advice would be appreciated.. thanks..

It looks like if it were a homework!

it's considered more as a 'challenge'.. =D my friend showed me what he could do with bash and it seems fun so i'd like to see if i can do it myself.. but it's my first time hands on at bash.. so i need a like you know 'headstart'..?

yes, everything you want, can be done! it's a lot of work but you will learn a lot of usefull things...
good luck...

p.s. have a look at the output of "ps -ef" for a nice processlist and if you pipe it and "grep" for a username... should be a good start

Why not ask your "friend" how he did it? The first thing to do is break open the manual for the operating system you are using and read the system commands it has available. Like the one DukeNuke2 mentions above. What you need do from there is write some shell code to run the commands, grab the output and parse it for the specific data you are interested in and display it however you want. If you are a good learner you will have something written by the end of the day.

#!/bin/bash

here u go.. headstart..

the "friend" that gave you this challenge = your teacher ?

you might want to play around with pipe, redirection, sed, grep, awk, those should be able to help you, read up especially on their manuals.