Dear All, After I exec the script, how come does not show - Processing $fname.... I try to debug, I found the script stop at -> if test -f $fname ; Would anyone help me what's wrong I have? Thank you. while true do for fname in $(ls /home/file/) do if test -f $fname ; then echo "Processing $fname..." fi done sleep 60 done

Can't see anything wrong with it. Works for me. Not that it's any help, but isn't this: for fname in $(ls /home/file/) the same as this: for fname in /home/file/*

It works fine for me as well. Try removing the semi colon. That might be stopping the whole thing there. Use like this. #!/bin/ksh while true do for fname in $(ls /home/pandera/) do if test -f $fname then echo "Processing $fname..." fi done sleep 6 done

The ls is returning simple file names, not fullpath names, so you need to change the if-statement to: if test -f /home/file/$fname ; then

Dear All, Thank you for yours help. When I run the script, I find that the error shows : "test" command not found. If my OS-Unix may not have the command - "test", what's other command I can use? I have another question? inputfile name : infile contain: sky moon sun star while read do $1=cat infile | cut -c1-3 $2=cat infile | cut -c5-4 $3=cat infile | cut -c10-3 $4=cat infile | cut -14-4 done < infile How can I get each field in the input line from a text file? Thank you. Apple

Hi: I'm not certain what you're doing with that while loop, but if you have a file with a known number of columns, you can do this: #!/bin/ksh while read col1 col2 col3 col4 do echo $col1 . . done < infile If you don't, you can always use cut, but I prefer to use the set command which sets the command line arguments $1, $2 ..: #!/bin/ksh while read line do set - $(echo $line) echo $1 # sky echo $2 # moon . . done < infile

In ksh and others, [[ -f filename ]] is equivalent to test -f filename btw, why "cat infile | cut -c1-3"? Seems odd when cut can take a filename argument.