Shell Programming and Scripting

I would think your first choice easier to understand and error-check.

I personally like the first approach since between those two lines you can insert
>echo $UL_PROCESS

This get to preference, skill level, speed necessary (if churning thru lots of records) and ability for others to understand your code in the future. Thus, I normally choose the path where I set a variable in one line, then check it next.

Perhaps logic like the following, and I know the syntax is all bad!

while $UL -eq 0
do
if filetype=temp
then
do your hostname thing
exit
fi
sleep
date # show that something is happening and looping, delete later
done

#at this point $UL -ne 0 & not temp filetype
#so the rest of your logic

Thanks for the example. My question was because I wasn't sure if the variable UL_PROCESS would be set/reset every time.

What I'm doing is creating a script that can be run via cron or command line. Basically it looks to see if certain files exist, if they do then it checks if a certain process is running; if it's not, it keeps checking, otherwise, it gets the stats for that file that was processed and e-mails them. This (the function I posted) is (seems to be anyway) the only part that's not working correctly.

I'll try to repost in the next few days on my progress. Thanks!