(Late post - lost connection, may be out of context)
The version is in the output from the "uname -a" command. It should then be possible to look up whether your Solaris is an old one which has the old Bourne Shell for /bin/sh or a new one with the more modern Posix Shell.

1) The big inefficency is using a Shell "read" to read records line-by-line from a data file, then using multiple "awk" runs to separate the fields.
I see now why you reassigned the channels because you are already using the Shell input channel to read a list of files.

I agree with the ideas behind "agiles" modifications.

2) As you have a list of required files, use that list.
I'd add a test to the script to check whether the file exists.
I see that "agiles" modification is ingeneous because it allows for this by sending errors to /dev/null:
3) Invoke awk only once and use it to read the data from the files.
A lot of the inefficiency comes from the number of times the original script starts "awk" to process the same $line .

4) Hold the list of 133 files in a real file not an environment variable and use "while" rather than "for". Some Bourne shells will not let you have an environment variable that big.

5) Consider making a version of K2test.sh which only generates the relevant 133 files in /home/sratta/feds/localCurves/curves .

6) Noticed that the variable $LOWERCASEFILE is not set anywhere.

7) If you have a journalling filesystem it is inefficient to repeatedly create a batch of files then overwrite them with Shell. Depends whether K2test.sh removes old files before generating new files.