Linux Journal Scripting Games?

Here's one that's almost as trivial as the Scripting Guy's exercises.

Beginner: Take as input a list of tab-separated values. One column of this input will be numeric. Sort the list by the numeric column in ascending value and output the sorted list.

Example input:

yellow	2	banana
red	1	apple
purple	3	passion fruit

Example output:

red	1	apple
yellow	2	banana
purple	3	passion fruit

Advanced: Same task, but the number of numeric columns is unknown. You may assume that each column contains either text or numbers, but not a mix of both (unless you go for the third extra points goal). The script must exit with an error if no numeric column is found. If multiple numeric columns exist, prompt the user for which one to sort by.

• Extra points awarded if the script accepts a command-line switch allowing the user to pre-select the sort column without prompting.
• Extra points awarded if the script permits the user to specify (by prompt or command-line switch) ascending or descending sort.
• Extra points awarded if the script checks all the rows in the input before deciding that a column is numeric.
• Extra points awarded if a separator character other than tab can be specified on the command line.

This one is more involved, but accomplishes a more useful task.

Beginner: You have a directory hierarchy full of files that may have odd filenames (mixed case, spaces and other special characters). Create a script to copy these files to another location while maintaining the directory structure, changing all names so they only use the letters a through z (lowercase), numerals, period, underscore, and hyphen. The first character of any filename or path component may not be a hyphen. The script must avoid filename collisions (e.g., if the original directory contains foo.txt and FOO.TXT, these files must both end up in the new hierarchy and have different names).

Advanced: Same task, with the added constraint that the script must maintain the file extension (e.g., foo.txt and FOO.TXT can become foo.txt and foo_2.txt, but not foo.txt and foo.txt_2). Also, generate a list on standard output of the old filenames mapped to the new ones.

• Extra points awarded for adding a command-line switch to save disk space that, instead of copying the files, will create the new files as symbolic links to the original files.
• Extra points awarded for minimizing mangling of filenames (e.g., converting accented characters to their unaccented equivalents, special characters to a descriptive name [50%foo.txt to 50_percent_foo.txt]).