On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 06:09:59PM -0600, Mike Miller wrote: [snip] > Have any of you done this kind of thing before? Let me know if you know > of code for converting scripts or have ideas on how to make the thing > below do more or work better. I don't know about your scripts, but most of the ones I write have a bunch of if statements and cases in them. Such statements can be a bit tricky in bash at first due to all of the implicit typing. A few pointers: if [[ ... ]]; # this is a conditional expression Example: if [[ $foo == "bar" ]]; then echo $foo; fi if (( ... )); # this is an arithmetic expression Example: if (( $num < 10 )); then echo "Oops!"; exit; fi (( )) is also a nice way to do boolean conditions in bash, I've found. let's say you want to exit if a command has failed: mv foo bar; if (($?)); then "Couldn't rename foo!"; exit 1; fi $? is the exit status of the last command run. If it's 0, i.e. the last command exited without error, the if will be false. HTH, Gabe -- Gabe Turner gabe at msi.umn.edu UNIX System Administrator, University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute http://www.msi.umn.edu