Moderator's Comments:

Some administrative notes: I understand that this is a borderline case and appreciate the consideration. Nevertheless you should have contacted any moderator or admin to get a decision on this. In fact we are here to help you and we appreciate being asked for help because this justifies us bossing around innocent users like i do right now. ;-)) My heartfelt thanks go to Don Cragun for showing so much consideration. I really appreciate this. In my opinion this thread is better suited to the "Homework and Coursework" board and i am going to transfer it there. Please supplement the missing information from the questionnaire, which is obligatory in this part of the board: 4. Complete Name of School (University), City (State), Country, Name of Professor, and Course Number (Link to Course)

Now to the threads content itself:

I am not sure if this is in the scope of the question, but i miss some input validation: what will happen in the following cases:

Code:

min 0 -1
min -2 -5
min foo bar
min 1.5 1.6
min 0 1 2
min 1
min

Right now the behavior of your program is not only "unspecified" but also "not determined" and this is generally a bad idea, as the venerable Don Cragun probably knows best of us all.

It is good style to make programs as foolproof as possible, which means: always validate your assumptions. If you get input from users check if it is what you expect it to be. If you allocate temporary space (i.e. by using a tempfile) make sure the file system provides the free space you expect to need. If you want to write a file make sure the privileges the script is run under include write access there - etc., etc., ... True, this makes scripts a lot more complicated (i often end up writing 100 lines for basically executing a single command), but it also will make sure it exits with some defined state.

Always strife to build programs as finite-state machines. They do not always have to carry out their goal, but at least they should respond in a defined way to obstacles. Specifically for your script: it doesn't need to "correct" unintended inputs, but it should react with some defined exit state and/or some error message telling the reason why it can't continue.

Heres some more questions, are the ansers I've given correct? Will they get all the marks?

hmm.... First, I'd like to doubt that you are using or are being tought csh. Using csh is more than antiquated today, it is not POSIXly correct and generally csh Programming Considered Harmful as Tom Christiansen has pointed out already in 1996.

Second, if you indeed use csh: check your answer again, very carefully. UNIX is neither "Unix" nor "unix", you know. ;-))

I hope this helps.

bakunin