UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello everyone,

I've been struggling with an assignement for school for quite some time now and I decided to make a thread here. The goal of the script is to return all the words that can be created with a certain combination of letters that can be given as an argument for the shellscript. It's not necessary that the all these letters are used, but every letter can be used only once.

They also gave us some guidelines on how to make this script :
-> Save the first word (the combination of letters) in the hold space, so you can use it later on
-> For all other words you make a copy of the word in the pattern space, and separate it from the original worth with a verical line ( | )
-> Add the hold space to the pattern space
-> Use a loop in sed that erases both a letter from the duplicate as from the combination of letters till all the letters of the duplicate are used or till there are no corresponding letters
-> Only write the original version of the word (the word before the |) if all the letters behind the | are gone.

I know this is a lot of text, but here is some code to make up for it

Code:

    $ scrabble scriptingtalen
    actie
    scrabble

    agent
    derive

    general

    alen
    alge
    belgium

    alpinist
    breakfast

    alpinisten

This will turn into this :

Code:

    $ scrabble scriptingtalen
     actie|actie
     scrabble|scrabble

     agent|agent
     derive|derive

     general|general

     alen|alen
     alge|alge
     belgium|belgium

     alpinist|alpinist
     breakfast|breakfast

     alpinisten|alpinisten

And eventually :

Code:

    $ scrabble scriptingtalen
     actie
      agent
       alen
     alge
      alpinist
      alpinisten

I already found this part of the code :

Code:

#!/bin/bash

WOORDENLIJST='./woordenlijst.txt'

echo $1 | cat - ${WOORDENLIJST} | sed -nf sedscript 

---------
sedscript
---------
1h
2,${
s/.*/&|&/
G
:a
s/\(.*\)|\(.\)\(.*\)\n\(.*\)\2\(.*\)/\1|\3\n\4\5/
ta
/|$/s/\(.*\)|$/\1/
P
}

I'm speak Dutch and the "woordenlijst.txt" document is a file which contains a couple of thousands of words.

There are still some faults in my code and I'd like to have them pointed out, or to get a better solution to solving this exercise.

Thanks in advance,
iFaceDive

Hi.

Please post classroom or homework problems in our homework forum (using the guidelines for posting there).

Many thanks.