TCSH Script

[Phoenix940]

Hello all. I am currently writing a TCSH script that takes three numerical arguments (these are supposed to be sides of a triangle) and tells the user if the triangles is scalene, equilateral, isosceles, right triangle, or not a triangle. My first problem is that the program isn't supposed to take non-numerical input, and I can't use anything but TCSH to write this (no I really wish I could use BASH or Perl to do this.) I guess TCSH has no built in way of detecting if a string is numeric or not (it sounds like TCSH scripting just sucks anyways), so I decided the best way to do it is to try:

@ argvnum = 1
while ( $argvnum <= $#argvnum ) 
         @ check = $argv[argvnum] >& tempfile
         if ( cat tempfile == '@: Expression Syntax.' ) then
                    echo "Non-numerical input given for argument $argvnum."
                    echo "3 numerical sides needed for arguments."
         endif
         @ argvnum++
end

Which of course doesn't work...
So I guess my question is, since theres no way I know of to determine if a variable string is a number and get an error output understandable to an average user, how can I take the text contents of a file and input it into a string? Is there a better way to do what I am trying to do above? Also what command forces the script to quit (since I don't want it to go any further if it detects a argument that isn't a number)?

[drl]

Hi.

This seems to be homework, such as for CS 155: Intro to Unix | Main / HW4

Posting homework questions violates the forum rules: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...ums-rules.html

I suggest reading the man page to see if there are features in tcsh that would help you.

If this is not homework, then perhaps there is a better tool to use ... cheers, drl