No problem.

To learn shell scripting is complex and easy at the same time. It is complex because shell scripting is a programming language and it has to be learned like any other programming language. This is too much information to be passed to do so in a forum by exchanging postings. Buy a good book and read that, we have even a list of recommendable books in the forum. My personal favourite for learning the "Korn Shell", one of the most common shells there are, is

Barry Rosenberg, Hands-On KornShell93 Programming


Yet, script programming is easy because basically every command you enter on the command line could be put into a simple text file and then executed as script. Example:

You enter at the command line "ls -l" to list the directory content. Now let us turn this into a script:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

ls -l

put that into a file called "myscript.sh", make it executable by issuing:

Code:

chmod 754 myscript.sh

and then execute it:

Code:

./myscript.sh

That is all - you have written your first script. Some details need explanation, though: you probably notice the first line. This simply tells the system, when executing the script, it should load this specific shell "/bin/ksh" first and execute the script with it. You can leave this line out but a Unix system can have several different shells installed and if you want control over which one it uses for your script you will want to make that clear by this first line.

If your system doesn't have "/bin/sh" replace it with any other shell. A script that basic will probably be executed by every shell. Still, if you pick a shell you should select one which is POSIX-compatible and common, which leaves 2 shells foremost: Korn shell (ksh) and Bourne again Shell (bash). Of these two i prefer "ksh", but this is at least partially personal preference.

To your problem: what you showed as "script" is basically some ftp-script. "ftp" is the client side of the "file transfer protocol" and a client-/server- software which implements that. "ftp" is interactive and can take commands from the user while it runs. The "script" is simply a list of such commands. To the shell this is only one command (the "ftp" itself). As i told you above you can put this into a script just the way you issue it on command line.

I hope this helps.

bakunin