I see you have some of your answers already, but just to make sure this is crystal clear:

First, I recommend programming in ksh. Bash is nice, but it may not be available on all architectures that you may work with. Ksh is more portable and has enough programming features to keep you happy for a while.

For using arrays, just do a Google search on "unix ksh array" or "unix bash array". For the ksh one, this link- the first one that came up- looks good: Korn Shell Arrays - Assigning and Accessing Values - Part I

Next: Starting with "0" as the beginning element of a list or array is a programmer's thing. End users don't usually count starting with 0. So I make sure to fill the 0'th element of the array with something silly that will never be used.

Finally, this:

Code:

for entry in *; do
    [ -d "$entry" ] && dirs="$dirs $entry"
done

...is kind of tricky for a new person. It was years before I learned it. Here's the explanation:

Let's say you do an "ls" in your home directory:
ls

And let's say you have 2 files and two subdirectories. So the results of ls may be:
dir1 dir2 file1 file2

Now- I'm going to get off track for a second- if you wanted to look for the string "mschwage" in all your files, you might do something like

Code:

grep mschwage f*

. What happens when you type that command to the shell? A number of things:Notice: the shell hands the argument list to grep. Grep never sees an asterisk.. You need to be aware of how the shell processes command lines.

Now, back to the for loop: Here-

Code:

for entry in *

the asterisk matches everything in your current directory. In this example, it will match
dir1 dir2 file1 file2
Each one of those entries then, is assigned to the variable "entry", one by one, for each cycle through the loop. So after the shell expands the asterisk, the line looks like:

Code:

for entry in dir1 dir2 file1 file2; do

Next, I test each one of those entries and, if it IS a directory, append it to the "dirs" variable. So when all is said and done, dirs will look like:

Code:

not_using_0 dir1 dir2

...a list of 3 items, in this case. Every entry in dirs, starting with item 1 (not item 0), is a directory in the current directory.