shell scripts?

yup

first time programming since I took Fortran 3 years ago

yup was in the same boat as you

my scripts run, except for 2 hours in the middle of the night. There's something wrong with my If statement.

it was as simple as one too many pairs of parentheses

one of the things that bugs me is that when you run it live on a workstation it works fine, but when you cron it, it doesn't work properly

that issue is mostly because of directory structures...but gets me every time!

so far I've avoided that problem by: using forward slashes & declaring my directory structures as variables

it helped that inputting and outputting to specific directory structures were part of the assignment