Wow, yeah... whenever you have

Code:

something="`echo $variable`

just do

Code:

something="$variable"

Also,

Code:

ping -c 2 $line > /dev/null 2>&1
status=`echo $?`
if [ $status -eq 0 ]
then
...

can just be

Code:

if ping -c 2 $line > /dev/null 2>&1
then
...

Also, I'm not entirely sure what this line is doing:

Code:

if [ "$line" ]

...but if you're guarding against blank lines:

Code:

if [ ! -z "${line}" ]
...

Or better yet, do this. It will skip blank lines without another layer of nested if at all:

Code:

[ -z "${line}" ] && continue

Constructs like these are extremely slow since they can run cut uncountable numbers of times.

Code:

value1=`echo $value | cut -d ' ' -f $i`

Instead, since you're using a shell that supports arrays, just split it into an array once then use the array. This should split fine on spaces:

Code:

ARRAY=( $value )

...

value1="${ARRAY[$i]}"

You can also split on other characters by changing the IFS variable but be aware that this affects read too.

You're running grep many, many times per loop. This is slow. Instead of

Code:

if ! grep file string1 ; then str=no ; fi
if ! grep file string2 ; then str=no ; fi
...

try

Code:

HAS1=0
HAS2=0
HAS3=0
HAS4=0
while read TESTLINE
do
        [[ "${TESTLINE}" =~ $string1 ]] && HAS1=1
        [[ "${TESTLINE}" =~ $string2 ]] && HAS2=1
        [[ "${TESTLINE}" =~ $string3 ]] && HAS3=1
        [[ "${TESTLINE}" =~ $string4 ]] && HAS4=1
done < file
OKAY=0
[ "$HAS1" -gt 0 ] && [ "$HAS2" -gt 0 ] && [ "${HAS3}" -gt 0 ] && [ "${HAS4}" -gt 0 ] && OKAY=1

This reads the file only once and doesn't execute four extra processes. Note that the ~= regular expression operator only works in bash.

Whenever you have VAR=`something | grep something | grep something | grep something` that's an enormous performance waster, and likely possible with shell built-ins, though exactly how depends on what bits you want to get.

...and so forth and so forth. Your script is enormous. You might want to break it into functions so you can tell what's happening where. Functions are easy:

Code:

function myfunc
{
  echo $1 $2
}

myfunc a b

They act like processes in that they return numbers, not strings, and output to stdin/stdout/stderr. But they can set global variables (as long as they're not behind a pipe).

The advanced bash scripting guide is a nice reference.