You will acquire a wide range of skills in this course. These skills will apply to many shell scripts you may write.
To practice applying these skills, you will complete several smaller scripts. These scripts can be run independently or run from a main controlling script, which has already been written for you.

For the duration of this course, imagine that you are on a volleyball team. You are in charge of keeping track of information for all the players. You have a list of four players and have stored this information in a file called volleylist. You will write a series of scripts to help you add or remove information, search this file, and create a sorted mailing list of players.

Each line of the volleylist file contains information about a different player. Each player’s information is listed on the line, with a colon separating the pieces of information. This is a very common format for a text data file in UNIX. You can use the techniques that you see in the course project with any text file in a similar format and with the output of most UNIX commands.
You will encounter this format in system administration files such as

/etc/passwd 

(which contains account information for a UNIX system) and in the output of commands such as ls –l (which lists detailed information about a file in a directory.) The /etc/passwd file uses the colon character as a separator, the ls –l command uses spaces as a separator, but the idea is the same.

Click the Exercise button to explore the starting script for the course project.
Course Project - Exercise