Shell Programming and Scripting

I haven't been on a unix system in a long time and I'm trying to teach a friend unix. After looking at/testing various options cygwin seemed to be the easiest to download and install.

Everything works pretty much as I recall and I even tested a small java program on it.

I can't seem to get scripts to work. We used to set up scripts to run files and redirect output and or input.

for instance c_grape would contain java prog > prog.out
or c_ls would contain ls -l > dump

so we would chmod 777 the file and just type c_ls or c_grape and it would run.

when I try this I get an error saying command not found. I tried renaming the file with a .exe on the end of it and it ran but didn't execute the commands in the shell, as far as I can tell.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.

Have you given the absolute path to the script? It may be the directory the script is in is not on the PATH.

What command is it saying is not found?

yeah. that was it. thanks

I don't remember having to do that and I don't know of any other systems that work that way either

when I'm in dir1 and I type java prog it works.
when I'm in dir1 and I type c_java which contains java prog it doesn't work and I get the bash: c_java: command not found.
when I'm in dir1 and I type ~/dir1/c_java it works fine but you shouldn't have to do that.

Really?

It's bad practice to have "." on the current path, so just typing a program name of a program in the current directory shouldn't work by default.

Alas, operating systems like CP/M hence MS-DOS hence Windows think it's okay, and don't even bother to consult PATH if it's in the current directory.

Rule #1: Never have "." in your PATH.

Rule #2: Never use 777 permissions.

Rule #3: If you break rule #1 and/or rule #2, don't be surprised when it all goes pear-shaped! UNIX is allegedly famous for not having viruses, but the above two things can completely remove any need for them to knacker a system.