Hi all,

I'm just learning to write shell scripts (new to the whole UNIX thing) and I'm wondering if anyone would like to help me create a resource to help me, and others like me, learn scripting. It would be something like "100 interesting shell scripting problems".


My motivation / reasoning is this: I've been learning for a while, but as I'm doing it for pleasure (not for work), I don't really need to write a lot of shell scripts. I've already written a few simple scripts to automate some of my daily tasks, but I want to take my scripting to the next level.

I've got a lot of great books, tutorials, web pages, etc. to help me learn, but they are mostly used for reference, as the examples they include are rather general / trivial, and they don't have many exercises.

Basically, I have a lack of "interesting problems to solve" and therefore a lack of real learning opportunities and practice. I know that others have the same problem too.

So, I'm looking to create a list of practical, interesting, real-world problems which gradually increase in difficulty. It will be similar to thekarangoel's git repo "Projects" where you can learn Python by solving the problems given (sorry, can't post links yet).

As an example, in case I'm not making myself clear, there could be a list of categories, such as:
- Account Admin
- Backup
- Games
- Networking
- File manipulation
- etc.

Each category would contain a number of problems to solve. Some (rubbish) examples might be:
- Create a script which counts the number of users currently logged in.
- Create a script which backs up all the dotfiles for the current user.
- Create a script which converts all file names to lowercase and removes whitespaces.
- Create a script which converts Markdown formatted text into HTML files.

It will be a kind of learn-by-doing system. The learner will be responsible for finding the information and resources necessary to solve the problem, and may upload his solution for others to study. The problems could include difficulty ratings, hints / tips, suggestions or links to solutions or helpful resources to aid the learner, if need be.

I would make the resource available online as a webpage, wiki, git repo, ebook, or whatever else people want.

As I said, I'm happy to do the heavy lifting myself, but lack of knowledge / experience stops me from creating meaningful problems, or even decent categories of problems / tasks.

Any feedback, help or suggestions would be very much appreciated, but as stated at the beginning all I need to get started are suggestions for interesting problems to solve using shell scripting.

Thank you,

Nickednamed