Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello everyone,

I have about 1500 compact discs of seismic data that I need to retrieve and place onto the hard drive so that I can index and process them.
The data was generated at 20 seismic stations and each disc has a been assigned unique name. The name is NOT necessarily what is on the disc itself. In fact, there is no conformity into what the station operator chose to call each disc when it was created. Some of the disc names contain Cyrillic (Russian) characters and white space. The new name format is a nine character system that contains the four letter station code, the two digit year, a letter N, and a two digit code representing disc sequence.

I would first like to create a KSH script that does these things:

Once mounted in the CD drive bay, identify the disc name and store within a variable. (This is what I have not figured out how to do.)

Poll the user for the station name.
Poll the user for the new disc name.

Copy the contents of the CD into the appropriate directory.
Change the permissions on the file.
Rename the newly copied folder with the contents to reflect the newly assigned disc name.

I've got this much, which is a very wordy script that doesn't quite work. I want to remove the requirement for the user to type in the disc mount ID, and instead use what is there. There's got to be a variable somewhere in the system, but hell if I can't find it.

Anyone got any suggestions? I'm combing through the manuals, doing google searches, searching this forum, but haven't yet found the answer. Scripting, if you haven't guessed it, is essentially new to me. My programming skills have been proven to be rusty enough to get red dust on the keyboard. The last time I did anything remotely like this was in 1985 on a DEC PDP11.

---
Dan's KSH script example:

Code:

USEAGE="usage: copyCD - Copies the seismic CDs into the collection"    #
print -n "Ensure that the CD is first loaded within the CD drive and is mounted."
print -n "Enter the CD name: (SSSSYYNDD) where SSSS = station name, YY = year, DD = Disc ID:  "
read diskid
print -n "Enter the loaded CD identification: \n"           # I want to automate this part!
read cdname
print -n "Your disc name is "$diskid"\n"
print -n "Enter the name of the Station. "
read stationid
if [[ ! -d ~/Documents/Sample_data/$stationid ]]
then 
    mkdir ~/Documents/Sample_data/$stationid
    print -n "~/Documents/Sample_data/"$stationid" created.\n"
else
    print -n "Station directory already exists.\n"
fi

print -n "Begin copy of contents of "$cdname" into directory ~/Documents
/Sample_data/"$stationid"/"$diskid"/\n"

cp -rn "/media/$cdname" "~/Documents/Sample_data/$stationid/"

chmod -R 775 "~/Documents/Sample_data/$stationid/$cdname"

mv ~/Documents/Sample_data/$stationid/$cdname ~/Documents/Sample_data/$stationid/$diskid

Moderator's Comments:

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