Scripting

[Silvan Villiger <vsilvan@stud.phys.ethz.ch>]

Hi,

I've started to learn scripting in linux. But I have some troubles 
understandig the redirection of the streams. I tried to test whether a 
directory already exists using the ls command (didn't find a bether 
solution) and whenever ls doesn't find such a directory it writes an 
error to the error-stream (I think) which still occurs on the shell 
calling the script if I pipe the output of ls in the script to another 
program.

Another example I had, was when I tried to compile a latex-file in a 
script. How can i prevent it from writing compiling-informations to the 
shell which started the script?

I'm sorry if this are newbie-questions, but... I am a newbie :-). And I 
really have red a lot of guides, but there are so many informations out 
there...

Greetings...      Silvan