Problem Statement

Invoking NOTES without commandline arguments displays the current contents of the local NOTES.TXT if it exists. If NOTES has arguments, the current date and time are appended to the local NOTES.TXT followed by a newline. Then all the arguments, joined with spaces, prepended with a tab, and appended with a trailing newline, are written to NOTES.TXT. If NOTES.TXT doesn't already exist in the current directory then a new NOTES.TXT file should be created.

Let's start with the solution:

#
NOTES=$HOME/notes.txt
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
  [[ -r  $NOTES ]] && more $NOTES
else
  date >> $NOTES
  echo "  $*" >> $NOTES
fi


N=~/notes.txt;[[ $# -gt 0 ]] && { date ; echo " $*"; exit 0; }  >> $N || [[ -r $N ]] && cat $N


NOTES=$HOME/notes.txt
if test "x$*" = "x"
then
        if test -r  $NOTES
        then
                more $NOTES
        fi
else
        date >> $NOTES
        echo "  $*" >> $NOTES
fi