Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey everyone,

I am a newbie with perl, and I just have a quick question that may seem really stupid. Like I said, I'm new, so please bear w/ me

I'm trying to make a really simple program where there are two inputs. First one is just a string, and the next one is a number. Once the user inputs these two things, then the string is printed the X number of times, X being the number entered by the user.

Anybody know of how to do this..? I'll probably be kicing myself for asking the question once I figure out how to do it.

Thanks everyone!

-Jason

Provided this sound too simple for a homework problem ......

Use the x operator.

e.g.

#!/usr/bin/perl

# test.pl
my ($string, $num) = @ARGV;
print $string x $num;



Then try to run by

perl test.pl "ABC" 3

Is this homework? I havent written any Perl other than a few simple excercises in the "Learning Perl" by OReilly. This is really a pretty good book, and I would probably learn alot more Perl if I were able to use it at work. As it stands now, my client does not allow any open source software!

Anyway, if I were in your shoes and had to learn something, I would start with this (First focus on making it work, then work at making it efficient):

Read in your arguments. I believe Perl has the C equivalent of argv and argc to process values off of the command line. See the variable <STDIN> to read in values.

Once you have figured out that much, then all you have to do is use a for loop and loop for the number of times entered in from the command line. For each iteration, print the string.

Because there are a number of ways to do things in Perl, you will more than likely be able to accomplish this task with very little code! However, you will get much more out of this excercise if you learn the structure of the program, make the program work like you want it to and then, learn the Perl way of doing things (i.e. fewest lines of source code possible)

Good Luck

As google pointed out learning perl is a very good book to start with. You can access collection of books online at http://perl.hamtech.net

How do they get away with putting the "Perl CD Bookshelf" on the web? Costs about 130 bucks to buy!! I have the Bookshelf on CD and its great....though didnt know I could have pulled it off someones site for free. Are there other O'Reilly CD bookshelves online that you know of?

Another site
http://iis1.cps.unizar.es/Oreilly/perl/

Content seem to be the same though..But these are nice places to pull the docs from

Hey guys,

Thanks for the replies, I was able to get it work with that, I appreciate it. It's not a homework assignment for me. I think it may have been for a friend of mine, it's from a book called "A Little Book on Perl".

My friend took a UNIX class and he got that book with it. I got the book from him, and I'm going through the excercises right now just for fun. I don't have any of the O'Reilly books on Perl, but perhaps I should pick one of those up since they seem to be recommended quite a bit.

I have another quick question here... Another pretty stupid one that seems like it should be pretty obvious, but for some reason when I try it, it doesn't work.

Let's say I have the user enter a four-digit number on the keyboard. Then I want to output the two middle numbers. How would I do something simple like this? If someone could give me a few ideas, that'd be sweet... Thanks

-Jason