Welcome to the forum. There is no problem with being a beginner. We are here to help you (learn). How about i give you some pointers and you try to fill in the rest?

I take it, you want a separate tar-file for each folder, i.e. a batman.tar, a superman.tar, and so on, yes?

If so: this is really easy to set up by using a loop. Here is how to do it:

Code:

for DIR in /some/dir/to_be_archived/* ; do
    echo $DIR
done

This will cycle through all directory entries of /some/dir/to_be_archived/* (in scripts it is always better to use absolute paths instead of relative ones) and set the variable "$DIR" to each value for every run through the loop. As it is there is only one command - echo $DIR - but it shows the mechanism.

Because you perhaps want to use the last part of the name for the naming you need to extract this first into another variable and then use this:

Code:

for DIR in /some/dir/to_be_archived/* ; do
    echo full DIR is: $DIR
    echo dir name : ${DIR##*/}
done
full DIR is: /some/dir/to_be_archived/batman
dir name : batman
full DIR is: /some/dir/to_be_archived/superman
dir name : superman
full DIR is: /some/dir/to_be_archived/hulk
dir name : hulk
[....]

Now let us construct some commands around this:

Code:

cd /some/dir/to_be_archived
for DIR in /some/dir/to_be_archived/* ; do
    fSaveDir="${DIR##*/}"
    echo tar cvf /some/dir/to_be_archived/${fSaveDir}.tar ./${fSaveDir}
done
tar /some/dir/to_be_archived/batman.tar ./batman
tar /some/dir/to_be_archived/superman.tar ./superman
tar /some/dir/to_be_archived/hulk.tar ./hulk
[....]

If this is what you want, remove the "echo" so that the command - instead of being displayed - is executed. The same way you can add more commands inside the loop and use "${fSaveDir}" whereever you would enter the directories name.

This is understandable, but there is a better way to do this: UNIX-commands always set a "return code" upon their exit. This return code is 0 (zero) when the command was successful, something else when not. You can simply check this return code after each command and do something (write an error message, exit the script, ....) if it isn't 0. There is a special variable "$?" for this, but you can use an "if"-statement as well (i suggest you try it out with a few commands). First the command version, then the same within an if-statement:

Code:

# ls /etc/hosts ; echo $?
/etc/hosts
0

# ls /some/file/which/doesnot/exist ; echo $?
/some/file/which/doesnot/exist not found
2

Code:

if <some command> ; then
     echo "this command returned 0."
else
     echo "this command returned non-zero."
fi

This will make your script look like this, with a possible outcome below:

Code:

cd /some/dir/to_be_archived
for DIR in /some/dir/to_be_archived/* ; do
    fSaveDir="${DIR##*/}"
    if tar cvf /some/dir/to_be_archived/${fSaveDir}.tar ./${fSaveDir} ; then
          echo "tar-command for ${fSaveDir} successful"
    else
          echo "tar-command for ${fSaveDir} failed, aborting."
          exit 2
    fi
    if <next-command> ${fSaveDir} ; then
          echo "<next-command> for ${fSaveDir} successful"
    else
          echo "<next-command> for ${fSaveDir} failed, aborting."
          exit 3
    fi
    if
        [....]
    fi
done
tar-command for batman successful
<next-command> for batman successful
<other-command> for batman successful
[...]
tar-command for superman successful
<next-command> for superman successful
<other-command> for superman failed, aborting.

This would not only tell you what exactly worked but also where the script failed.

If you still have questions feel free to ask.

I hope this helps.

bakunin