I can't find anything on shell scripting here.Please let us use this thread to make a difference in unix shell sripting. I will like to start by asking "Which shell is the best to script in?"

There's a very solid unix scripting tutorial video on youtube. you should check it out


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otTfPzX2p80&feature=related

Hi Jabbok,
Here we go with the old "which is the best" question. Like most things in life which is the best is usually a matter of preference, the task at hand and the tools available.
But in any case if you are just starting out in unix shell scripting, I would recommend a unix-like OS like Linux and a shell that is quite universal and comes with most distributions like 'bash', you would like to also get familiar with most of the unix command line tools like sed, awk, grep.
When you get a bit proficient you might want to look at other options like perl and python
Ubuntu Linux http://www.ubuntu.com/is an easy to use OS to start with.
If you only have access to a window machine you might want to look at cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/ which provide most of the unix tools on windows.
You might also find a good bash scripting guide at http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ or google 'bash scripting' i any case always remember 'google is your friend'

maybe you should give us a problem to solve, I bet you I will get you a good answer. I have been using linux for about 10 months now and studying for the Linux + exam.

I read somewhere that the script below displays a chessboard when called on a Linux shell. I tried it on my Soalris 10 x86 system and I cant get it to display the chessboard. Can someone explain the sript to me and also I'll like to know how to make it to run on my solaris box ?
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for (( i = 1; i <= 9; i++ )) ### Outer for loop ###
do
for (( j = 1 ; j <= 9; j++ )) ### Inner for loop ###
do
tot=`expr $i + $j`
tmp=`expr $tot % 2`
if [ $tmp -eq 0 ]; then
echo -e -n "\033[47m "
else
echo -e -n "\033[40m "
fi
done
echo -e -n "\033[40m" #### set back background colour to black
echo "" #### print the new line ###
done