Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello all, i am a complete beginner when it comes to unix and shell scripting.

I want to be able to compress a file (ff) with a shell script for example the command would look like

compress.sh ff

then with the script have the file compressed using the zip, gzip and compress commands.

I want to have the size of the file and the size of hte compressed file outputed to the screen with the three programs something like this

gzip 17375 5550 68.1
zip 17375 5665 67.4
compress 17375 7641 56.0

each of the values should be in columns also.

with the last column being the compression ratio. those numbers are just examples.

I'm having trouble storing the value of the filesize in a variable and also how to get the data displayed like I would like it above in columns.

I was thing of having the example stored to a file as then I can have the 3rd column sorted by the compression of the file.

Any help would be greatly appreciated in how to ge this done.

Cheers

Tony

Use arrays to store the values (to get filesize you can use something like $size=`ls -l | awk '{print $5}'`). Look at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/arrays.html

Pipe your output through the sort

Try '\t'