Thanks for the response Jerry,

My problem seems to run deeper,

I have a directory called shp_mslinks, with a series of files, lets say;

XXXX_original.shp
XXXX_UPDATE.shp
YYYY_original.shp
YYYY_UPDATE.shp
ZZZZ_original.shp
ZZZZ_UPDATE.shp
ect.

I also have a do loop which will preform a transformation on each file in the shp_mslinks directory, my loop;

# enter do loop and translate each shp file in the InputDirectory

for file in $InputDirectory/*.shp
do
# strip off path
fname=${file##*/}
# strip off extention
fname=${fname%.*}
print |tee -a -i $WorkingDirectory/change.txt
print "translating $fname.shp from shape to shape" |tee -a -i $WorkingDirectory/change.txt
print "======================" |teje -a -i $WorkingDirectory/change.txt

# run translation program
done

The problem is is only runs the transformation on the _original.shp files in the shp_mslinks directory and I want it to run on both the _original.shp and _UPDATE.shp

Thanks again.