Linux help?

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I'm taking a Unix class. Up until now, I've been getting c's in the class. Last night, we had a test - which I failed miserably, eliminating what little margin I had for error for the rest of the semester. Last night, we were also given an assignment, which we have to upload by midnight tonight, and I have NO idea how to begin. Thanks to my horrible test last night, I have to get a perfect grade on this (and all subsequent) assignments, or fail the course. I know I have to do a lot of studying and practice to get where I need to be, and I don't expect other people to do my homework for me, but there is no way that I can catch up to where I need to be in 12 hours.

The instructions for the assignment are to write a shell script which does the following:
- Prompt the user for a directory, or for the pwd, pr q! to quit
- Prompt the user for all or part of a filename
- Display, in the long format, all of the files, including hidden files, in the given directory including the given filename.
- Repeat until the user enters q!

If I can get the proper input from the user, I (think) I can display the proper directory listing, and I (think) I can loop it until the user enters q!, but I'm lost as to how to format the prompts themselves.

in bash?

it's just read variablename.

then you just want to pipe the output of ls -al to grep with the partial name, pretty simple.

Actually, while I realize that it is (still) dead simple, the assignment was a bit more than just that.

However, this was helpful, and I appreciate the response. Thanks!