Shell Programming and Scripting

This is looks like something I can

I have a question though, the “while read line” statement, how does this get information from the file, is it from this “done < "file"”?.

sorry if am asking silly questions i only been using UNIX for a week now :P

also can i use the grep to achieve this, if say i will be looking for occurrences of the current user who is executing the script?(in this case it should be me, but i can use it for others)

cat xx| grep -n .\*| grep "^1"

or something like that, i cant test it atm, but i think cat pipes file to 'grep -n' which inserts line numbers and pipes it to 'grep '^1' which gets the line 1. odds are this might fail as this is 1st time i am going to use grep

Trying out grep and am confused as hell
I am using $user to save time.
Is this a valid method? xx is the file with contents

Code:

grep –i xx $user

So form what am reading I need to use pipes (new to me)

Code:

grep –n xx

will display the line numbers?

And

Code:

grep –I $user

should check for the current username in the file.

Do I need an other grep command to start from from line 1?

So I can use an if statement to check if the users is in the file, if so do the following:

Code:

 grep –n xx | grep –I $user | grep '^1' | >> newfile

Any feedback would be great ^^

Change employer, he sounds like a teacher by giving you arbitary restrictions.

if it was only that simple porter

if am not using SED or Awk, i have no idea what am doing in these situations.

Perl, C, C++, Python, Pascal, Fortran, Java, ....

If an employer says write a UNIX script but don't use sed then that is called micro-managing. If a teacher says that it's because he wants you to grasp certain concepts.

ok i am using this now, it works fine, but all i need to do is restrict the lines shown by a user, so am trying it with $USER for now.

#!/bin/bash/

x=0
while read line
do
x=$((x+1))
echo "$x ) $line"
done < "xx"

thx ghostdog74

thanks everyone for your help it works like a charm now.