Messure minimum distance between points and land

[mudiver]

I am working on a dataset containing movements of sharks along a coastline. I have a location estimate for the sharks every 15 minutes. I am trying to find the minimum distance from shore for each position of each shark. I can do this manually using the measure tool, but I have thousands of positions. Is there a way to automatically measure the distance between a series of positions and a shoreline shapefile? Sorry if this is a newbie question, but I mostly use qGIS to make pretty maps .

Thanks for your help,

Tim

[GuZzO]

use postgis to do such measurement it would be simpler!
Postgis provides a good manual with example

[mudiver]

Thanks for the advice! I just loaded it and will try it out.

[Gede2A]

between two point layers you can have a matrix distance file with ftools, analyse tools, distance matrix