Wow I'm so zoned out I don't even know if I posted this question up already (I couldn't find it in my book marks or in "yesterday's" post).

My question is, I'm writing a korn script that does something like the following, but I don't yet completely understand the syntax. I need to check that the first field equals a string and that the second string equals a space. This isn't working -- is it right or wrong?

Could u please provide us with the file that u r using

As the result depends upon wether the file contains 1 record or many

Ah yes, of course. Let me type out the larger picture so you can see how it's working.

The ls.txt is a cut listing of filenames (one filename per line).
As I'm opening each file, which happen to be all fixed-length csv files, I'm cutting the first field and the fifth field.

The following would be an example of two records (each line in each fixed-length csv file is a record with aproximately 32 fields). I have isolated the two fields for you.

Example fields (the forum deletes extra spaces so it would be easier I think if I describe it instead: FIELD1 is in columns 2-4 (a string of 3 letters), and the the second column aka FIELD5 can either be filled with a one digit number (1-9) or a single space (" ").

I'm kind of thinking that maybe it's not working because... if you try to use the "cut" command and it cuts a single space, maybe the shell doesn't assign anything to the variable?

man test

Question: I just started learning shell scripting a few days ago and I was under the assumption that you didn't need to typeset anything.

One of my previous counters looked like this (in a while statement, not an if statement:
var1=`expr $var1 + $var2`
..and it worked.

But when I tried the expr command in the if statement, it didn't increment at all. Would you know why this is? Could it be because once you enter an if statement, you must use different rules?

you don't.
if you don't,

count=$((count + 1))
becomes
count=$(($count + 1))

this NOT using ksh/bash builtin capabilities for doing simple integer math.
nope, that's not it.
are you saying that the 'expr ' increment did not work, but the 'count=$((count+1))' did?
there must be something else different in your 'while' loop.
is your 'while' loopbeing piped with data?

I think it's because I'm doing something terribly wrong with my nested while statement.. Sorry I didn't mention it before, I didn't think it was the fault.

Here's the big picture.

I have a while statement inside of another while statement because the first while reads the filenames I need from file_names.txt. I then need to use the 2nd while statement to begin reading each filename.

edit: Hmm.... You know what, let me work on this for another hour and come back and tell you if it's still broken.