One of the possible Ans is (Tested on Solaris it works)

Answer to your both Questions in single Scr!!!

#!/bin/sh
date > tempdate
temp=`awk '{print $2}' tempdate`;
rm tempdate;
echo $temp;
for var in $temp
do
grep -i $var myfile | wc -l;
done;

Replace <myfile> with your absolute file path and <wc -l> whatever like <sort> or anything

1. Don't forget that ` is not the same as '.
The below statement sets the variable currentdirectory to the results of
the pwd command.
currentdirectory=`pwd`

2. You can either grep it through a case statment or you knuckle down
and learn regular expressions which I've not yet done either. ;-)

It is possible to store the value in a variable using the back quotes or grave
accent(`) This is not single quote. You will find it on the same key as tilde
(~).

rt=`date+%b` ; echo $rt

Your second question, reading the month from the system, refering to the first
question, you know how to get the month from the system date. Use the command in
back quotes that will help you. The command modifies as below

grep -i `date command to extract month` /home/nerd/CALENDAR.TXT | sort

#!/bin/sh
TEMP=`date +%b`
echo For $( date )
grep -i $TEMP /home/nerd/CALENDAR.TXT|sort

about the spam stuff, think spam assassin should do the job.
additionally, one could use a + tag to trace how your mail id was gathered by
the spammer in the first place.
for eg, if your mailid is sysadmin@..., when entering it anywhere(say
when you subscribe to a newsletter), you could enter
sysadmin+newsletter@....(i have been told anything after the '+' is
ignored by the SMTP servers.)

that way, the next time you get spam, you'll atleast be able to pin point the
source.

Modify the same as follows

#!/bin/sh
TEMP=`date +%b`
echo For $( date )
grep -i `date +%b` /home/nerd/CALENDAR.TXT|sort