Hi, I am trying to find an awk command or an unix script equivalent to do the following. I have the following txt file 1234 script.sh param1 param2 2345 script2.sh param1 param2 ... and so on I want something that would read the above file. run the script with the parameters. Grep through the results from the script for the word not running and in case the word is present write the first field (eg 1234) into an output file. The script has to iterate through the whole file and do this. Any ideas on how I can do it? I am trying to figure a way using awk but in vain...

Here is a way: #!/bin/ksh while read line do set - $(echo $line) cmdstr=$2 cnt=2 while (( $cnt < $# )) do ((cnt=cnt+1)) eval var=$(echo \$${cnt}) cmdstr="$cmdstr $var" done cmdstr="$cmdstr > $1" eval "$cmdstr" done < data.file # end script read each line use set to parse the line build the command line execute the command using eval.