Thanks for your help. I now have it working.

The path to my touch was ok. It turned out that your first suggestion worked helped me fix it, but I didn't realize because I'd introduced another error in the fix.

The problem was a carriage return (\r) at the end of each command line. I fixed this and created a new commands.bash script. It still didn't work, so I thought, "Darn, it still doesn't work" so I posted where I'd got to so far and went to bed. This morning I suddenly realized that by changing the commands.bash file, I also had to set it's chmod back to 755. I did this, and it worked.

Thanks a lot for your help. It was the suggestion to run the script verbose that really helped. This was my first ever shell script and I was "feeling around in the dark" a bit. Using the verbose option is a debugging technique that I can remember in the future.

Viola