title: Bourne Shell Scripting -- simple for loop syntax
body: <p>I'm not entirely new to programming, but I'm not exactly experienced. I want to write small shell script for practice. </p>
  
  <p>Here's what I have so far:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#!/bin/sh
  name=$0
  links=$3
  owner=$4
  if [ $# -ne 1 ]
  then
          echo "Usage: $0 &lt;directory&gt;"
          exit 1
  fi
  if [ ! -e $1 ]
  then
          echo "$1 not found"
          exit 1
  
  elif [ -d $1 ]
  then
          echo "Name\t\tLinks\t\tOwner\t\tDate"
          echo "$name\t$links\t$owner\t$date"
          exit 0
  fi
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Basically what I'm trying to do is have the script go through all of the files in a specified directory and then display the name of each file with the amount of links it has, its owner, and the date it was created. What would be the syntax for displaying the date of creation or at least the date of last modification of the file?</p>
  
  <p>Another thing is, what is the syntax for creating a for loop? From what I understand I would have to write something like for $1 in $1 ($1 being all of the files in the directory the user typed in correct?) and then go through checking each file and displaying the information for each one. How would I start and end the for loop (what is the syntax for this?). </p>
  
  <p>As you can see I'm not very familiar bourne shell programming. If you have any helpful websites or have a better way of approaching this please show me!</p>