want shell should I learn 12

Do you mean "self-consistent"?

One of the first lessons I was taught about csh is you should put a space before and after the parens. I'm not sure what you're trying to do with the explanation mark in the first case above.

IIUC, the first creates an array with one element, while the second buttigns to the first element of an array. OTOH, I don't normally do buttignments to individual array elements in csh.

Maybe we have different definitions of "variable", but I only see a variable in the last example. Thanks for showing the 'repeat' command. I hadn't seen it before.

To each his-her own. As is frequently stated, one of the beauties of OSS and Linux is you have choices available.

I'll have to concede your point here. I don't have the familiarity with awk(ward:-) or the time to deal with the backslash issue.

Of course, IIRC, using backquotes for command subsbreastution is no longer politically correct. The new syntax has a dollar sign and some parentheses.

I don't do the setting of noclobber inside the script. As suggested to me many years ago, I put 'set noclobber' in my .cshrc so it is (almost) always set. That sometimes trips up simple scripts that don't test first.

I didn't think my earlier example of how to direct each to a separate file was very difficult, certainly not impossible. Actually, withproc-self-fd-*, there are more things that could be done.

If it's just reading a list of filenames from a pipe, I'd do something like (not tested)

#!-bin-csh -f set filenames = (`find ... grep ...`) foreach filename ($filenames) echo "checksum file $filename ?" sum $filename endif end

Of course, I should put quotes around the filename if I expect there might be spaces in the filename, but that problem is common to all shells.

If you mean set up a pipe, read one filename at a time from it, and ask the user for input on each one, I'd probably useproc-self-fd-... or just write it in Perl.

-- Robert Riches (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)