Hello I am tring to write script for my computer class and having some trouble with an if statement checking a paramenter is true or false and then displaying files. I need user to enter a menu choice and their username. this will display the contents of their home directory. if user doesn't enter anything it will display the current users home directory. here is my code. I sure hope you can help. Trying to check that $1 has something in it. #!/bin/csh #12/6/2008 #CISS 125-70 #1 # display all files in user's home directory clear if (test \$1\ = \\) then ls ~ endif #ls /home/$1 sleep 5 menu

What are the available menu options? I recently did a UNIX course myself and had a similar question to what you're talking about and here's my script: ****Begin Script**** #!/bin/ksh clear while [ "$option" != "q|Q" ] do echo "Use one of the following options:" echo " d: To display today's date and present time" echo " l: To see the listing of all files in your present working directory" echo " w: To see who's presently logged in" echo " q: To quit this program" echo "Enter your option and hit <Enter>: \c" read option echo case "$option" in d|D) date ;; l|L) ls -ilSF ;; w|W) who ;; q|Q) echo "Exiting program...." echo echo exit 0 ;; *) echo "Invalid option, try your command again" esac echo echo echo -n "hit CR to continue : " read X clear done exit 0 ****End Script**** This is actually the end result after the text (and course) built on the original script which just performed one task and exited. I got playing around with it, tossed it in a 'while' loop and then the next step in the book was to do just that. You'll notice it error checks for incorrect key entries and will work with either a lower case entry or an upper case. The directory listing command just lists the files in the present working directory. I'm sure you can figure out how to make it show what's in the home directory. I hope this points you in the right direction.