Hi there, I am trying to do somehting similar, but on a wider scale. I am trying to write a script that would open the home directory, open the first (of 650) user's folder open the ?mail directory, which every user has Then I need the script to read each of the files and folder names with one preceding directory and a carriage return as the delimiter. Then the output is to be put into a file called .mailboxlist cd /home cd user1 cd mail grep ls (this is where I am most stuck – adding the ‘mail/’ before each name and a carriage return as the delimiter) > .mailboxlist (??) cp .mailboxlist /home/user1/.mailboxlist The file “.mailboxlist” should look like this: mail/Sent mail/Trash mail/Drafts mail/tech support mail/test1 After that is completed, I need the script to go to the next folder (user2) and do it again. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Nett

I would probably use perl myself (but thats just because I like it!), something along the lines of: perl -e 'foreach $user(`ls /home`){`ls -1 /home/$user/mail > /home/$user/.mailboxlist`}' I don't think that will prefix mail/ for each entry but it would be simple enough to put similar to the above into a script which opens a file and adds mail/ to each line before writing it....

for name in $(/bin/ls /home); do [[ -d /home/$name/mail ]] && for file in $(/bin/ls /home/$name/mail); do [[ -d /home/$name/mail/"$file" ]] && echo "mail/$file" >> /home/$name/.mailboxlist; done; done ( assuming it really should be "mail" rather than "Mail" )