i need a script which shd run for infinate loop and it should poll the current directory (excluding sub-directories)and whenevr a new *.txt comes, it shd call other script say temp.sh with this new *.txt as argument and once the processing is done, it shd poll again.

You use cron job for this . Vasanth

what does cron job mean? can you explain me how to do that?

check out this link: http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cg...

i did go through the link... bt i cldn't get hw exactly we can use tht.

It's simple enough. Assume your test program, test.ss, looks like this: #!/bin/ksh # test.ss # your PATH maybe different PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/sfw/sbin # your current directory will be different cd /home/nails/mytmp ls -1 *.txt 2> /dev/null|while read file do echo "$file" # execute what you want to # rm "$file" done cron, if set up correctly, can execute this ever minute. Here is how to do it. # it's always a good idea to save your user's cron file: crontab -l > mycronfile Now, place this line in mycronfile: * * * * * /path/to/test.ss This will execute test.ss every minute. To implement the cron command: crontab < mycronfile execute crontab -l to ensure the command now exists in cron. Not every Unix user is set up to execute cron. If you can't, the system administrator can grant users cron permissions.

In windows, I would do something like the following. In UNIX something similar ? (This is written in biterscripting (http://www.biterscripting.com) , but any scripting language will do.) Let's assume that you are looking for .txt files in C:/mydir. var str currentFileList var str oldFileList while (true) do lf -n "*.txt" "C:/mydir" > $currentFileList if ($currentFileList <> $oldFileList) # File list has changed - do something endif set $oldFileList = $currentFileList # for next time sleep 5 # Sleep 5 seconds done Hope this helps. Randir Randwa