I need to run the following command in a script, but I need to replace the 603528 with an input file. bpmedialist -ev 603528|grep 'Server Host'|awk '{print 603528,$4}'>list.txt this is what the input file looks like... 603528 605125 608452 609553

Since the loop will write multiple times to list.txt, it specifies a double right-angle bracket which will append. If a single right-angle bracket were used, each iteration of the loop would overwrite the contents. But to keep from appending the output to a previous execution, the script begins by removing list.txt. #!/bin/sh rm list.txt 2> /dev/null for fname in `cat inputfile` do bpmedialist -ev $fname| grep 'Server Host'| awk -v fname=$fname '{print fname,$4}'>>list.txt done exit 0

This doesnt work. I get this error message. Any ideas? awk: syntax error near line 1 awk: bailing out near line 1 FourSKY

Original awk did not support the -v option. On some platforms, the newer version of awk is nawk.