A bash script that would scroll through the files in a particular directory (an arbitrary number of files, with arbitrary names, in a specified directory) would be very useful. If someone knows how to achieve this, I would certainly appreciate your enlightenment. Thanks, Samer

It will be easier to do in perl script than bash due to need for random and array.

Random?? Array?? Where does that come from? We must be reading different descriptions. 'scroll through' - what do you mean my that. I imagine that you don't mean just list the files, because that can be done with 'ls'. So, maybe you mean to display the contents of each file: # change to the desired directory (dir name is first command line parameter) cd $1 # loop thru each file in the directory for file in `ls` do # display the file contents more $file done # change back to original directory cd - Make sure that you use back quotes around the ls command above

Thanks for the help. What I meant was, there are many times when one wants to do certain things, the same things to files in a directory, regardless of the names of the files, and how many files are in that directory, thats all.

find /dir -exec /bin/command {} \;

Look in the Bash programmin HOW-TO, section 7.1 (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO-7.html#ss7.1) change "echo item: $i" to whatever you need. If you are installing a bunch of RPMs it would be rpm -Uvh $i, whatever. Bash interprets anything inside parentheses as a command. The cool thing is you can do this all on the command line, no need to write a script unless you do the same thing over and over.