I have been working on this for the past hour and I can not figure it out 
What command would you give to produce a listing of the names of all the text files in ~/UnixCourse or its subdirectories (possibly nested several layers deep) followed immediately by the first line of text within that file? E.g., to produce a listing looking like this:
/home/yourname/UnixCourse/foo.txt
When in the course of human development
/home/yourname/UnixCourse/Quotations/b...
Curiouser and curiouser!
find ~/UnixCourse/ -name *.txt > ars.data
file=ars.data
while read line
do
echo $line
cat $line | head -1
done < $file
this forum is not going to do your home work for you....
show us what you have so far and we may help.
don't expect us to give you a full work answer.
have a play with this:
ls -R ~/UnixCourse
and this:
head -1 blarg.txt
and find command can be good too.
and read man pages for above commands.
well we are currently working on redirection and pipelines, do I need to use a wildcard to search for the .txt documents?
find ~/UnixCourse/fileAsst/*.txt
like that find all the txt documents
a good start, now we need to do things with each line of output.
so we use a pipe looks like this ---> |
and we go into a loop a bit like this
while read VAR; do stuff; done
in your case you will be doing a head -1 of $VAR.
so.....
find stuff | while, read VAR;do head -1 VAR;done
and I know there are two bugs in that, I won't give out full answers for a homework question....
I am guide , not an answer book 
Oh I wasnt expecting a full answer
robsonde you have been a great help, I am going to try your advice out and Ill post an update of how far I get
also what exactly does $VAR do?
find ~/UnixCourse -name *.txt -print | head --lines=[-]1
hmm still not working, I am having trouble using the head line
Take a look at xargs
No Homework. Thread Closed.