Shell Programming and Scripting

Thank you so much for the clear explanation. You are a very nice person to explain the things to others. Once again thank u.

No problem. Shell scripting is weird. I've been doing it since 1983 and it's still weird. Happy to help.

Perl is much better, but still weird.

I'm going to start learning Python. I think that will be a much better scripting language.
-mschwage

P.S. Definition of weird: Writing a 600 line shell script and forgetting to match the double-quotes in a string somewhere around line 200. Tracking down that error is part of the definition of 'pain'. Shell scripting is essential on UNIX, but oh boy...

When I run this, I am getting the below error. Why? Pls help me

#!/bin/ksh
echo Hello World
dirs="not_using_0"
for entry in *; do
[ -d "$entry" ] && dirs="$dirs $entry"
done
dirarray=($dirs)
index=1
while [ -n "${dirarray[$index]}" ] ; do
echo "${index}: ${dirarray[$index]}"
index=`expr $index + 1`
done
while [ -z "$ans" ] ; do
echo -n "Choose one -> "
read ans
[ -z "${dirarray[$ans]}" ] && echo "Invalid response; try again."
done
echo "Result is ${dirarray[$ans]}"




Hello World
arrayshell.sh: syntax error at line 7: `dirarray=' unexpected