Originally Posted by Power

I second buurmas, python is far easier to work with with all the API's. I program a lot on PHP as well on the web, but I am trying my hands on Python for the N900, just wrote a small script to block calls

Originally Posted by extendedping

despite its shortcomings I bought the n900 really only to learn shell scripting and perl.

Originally Posted by sdstrowes

Great! I hope you don't mind if I offer a couple of helpful comments on your code...

Code:

#!/bin/bash
convert=

case $1 in
group) convert=$(echo 1) ;;
album) convert=$(echo 2) ;;
label) convert=$(echo 3) ;;
year) convert=$(echo 4) ;;
*) echo "please input group, album, label, or year." ; exit 1 ;;
esac 

cut -f$(echo $convert) -d\| albums

You can tidy this slightly:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
	group) convert=1 ;;
	album) convert=2 ;;
	label) convert=3 ;;
	year) convert=4 ;;
	*) echo "please input group, album, label, or year."
	   exit 1 ;;
esac 

cut -f$convert -d\| albums

So the substitution of convert drops straight in place on your 'cut' command.

Another really useful tool to learn is AWK. You could replace your 'cut' command with a simple 'awk' program:

Code:

awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $'$convert'}' albums

To explain, AWK operates on each line in a file. AWK treats each line as a series of fields ($1 is the first, $2 is second, $0 is the entire line). Here, I've set the field separator (FS) to the pipe character ("|") before any lines of text have been read, and I've told AWK to print out the correct field on each line. It may be a bit more verbose than cut in this example, but AWK is a powerful tool which I use all the time.

Good luck and happy coding!

Originally Posted by extendedping

I thought any time you needed to get the value from a variable you had to use echo? no I guess not.

I will investigate your awk command further, I know a tiny about it but know it is its own programming language and am scared to even look at the chapter on it in my book

Originally Posted by altorn

im not fond of writing shell scripts (i use my pc with an SSH for that, ever so rarely)..

it would be great if we had a mini GCC or C++ compiler for the n900 so we can create even little console programs.