Report generation script in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Report generation script

📖 Scenario: You work in an office where you need to create a simple report from sales data every day. The sales data is stored in a text file with product names and sales numbers. You want to automate making a report that shows only the products with sales above a certain number.

🎯 Goal: Build a bash script that reads sales data from a file, filters products with sales above a threshold, and prints a simple report.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a sales data file with exact product names and sales numbers

Add a variable for the sales threshold

Use a loop to read the file and select products with sales above the threshold

Print the filtered report showing product names and sales

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Automating daily report generation from sales or other data files saves time and reduces errors.

💼 Career

Many jobs require writing scripts to process data files and create reports automatically.

1

Create the sales data file

Create a file called sales.txt with these exact lines:
Apple 50
Banana 30
Cherry 20
Date 40
Elderberry 10

Bash Scripting

# Create the sales.txt file with the exact lines
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo -e with newline characters \n to write multiple lines to sales.txt.

2

Set the sales threshold

Add a variable called threshold and set it to 25.

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Apple 50\nBanana 30\nCherry 20\nDate 40\nElderberry 10" > sales.txt
# Set the sales threshold variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use threshold=25 to create the variable.

3

Filter products with sales above threshold

Use a while loop to read each line from sales.txt. Inside the loop, use if to check if the sales number is greater than threshold. If yes, add the product and sales to a variable called report with a newline after each entry.

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Apple 50\nBanana 30\nCherry 20\nDate 40\nElderberry 10" > sales.txt
threshold=25
report=""
# Use a while loop to read sales.txt and filter products
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use while read product sales; do ... done < sales.txt to read the file line by line.

Use if [ "$sales" -gt "$threshold" ] to compare numbers.

4

Print the filtered report

Print the report variable to show the products with sales above the threshold.

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Apple 50\nBanana 30\nCherry 20\nDate 40\nElderberry 10" > sales.txt
threshold=25
report=""
while read product sales; do
  if [ "$sales" -gt "$threshold" ]; then
    report+="$product $sales\n"
  fi
done < sales.txt
# Print the report variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use printf "%b" "$report" to print the variable with newlines correctly.