Thanks, that encouragement is definitely helpful, it felt like I was struggling with something most programmers would consider should be mastered day 1, right after lunch because hello world is before lunch haha. Glad to know people still have to look it up even after a while sometimes.

I think my issue may be more than just syntax, I really am inexperienced lol, all just learning as I go (unix philosophy and all lol, I kid).

The for loop I stole from the internet for use with ffmpeg is

for i in *$input; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}$output"; done

So I know what it does, it takes the input (read by the script earlier) filetype and changes it to the output filetype also read earlier for all of the files of $input type in the current directory, and I know how I got input and output as variables, and I know the ffmpeg -i foo -o bar command, but I get completely lost on "$i" "${i%.*}$output";. I don't really understand when to use what brackets or where I need semicolons and why, though I do understand that $ calls a variable and * is an operator to designate "all," I'm not entirely sure what this part of my script is doing (as this loop is the part I copied from stackexchange, and only half understood it "but it worked so fuck it" lol.)