Hey all, This problem's been doing my head in, and I hoping that someone can point to me the error of my ways. Korn shell script, that takes in a file with an unfixed size takign the following format: N test Ireland N test2 England D test3 Japan In my script I want to do something to where the first val is "N" and something different when the first val is "D" --- Here's my effort ---- while read -r val1 val2 val3 do if [ "$val1"=="N" ]; then echo NEW VALUE.... elif [ "$val1"=="D" ]; then echo Deleting VALUE.... fi done script_file_from_above It always prints NEW VALUE... even when the first column is "D" -- Anyone see what I'm doing wrong? Thanks, kev.

Kev: Try: echo $NEWVALUE I think you forgot $ Regards, Nails

What's happening is that it always goes into the first loop - the 'echo New Value' is just a test to see if if parses the file correctly. The if loop where I perform a string comparison is where the problem lies, but I can't figure out why its not working - Any ideas? Thanks, Kev.

Kev: Sorry, I should have read your original post closer. On Solaris 7, I had to place spaces around the "==" signs. BTW, double equal signs are optional - single ones work as well. Regards, Nails

Cheers - that worked finally! Sometimes the way different OS versions read in data is a bit annoying - I spent 2 hours trying to fix that --- At least I know now in the future! Thanks, kev.