There seem to be some misunderstandings about how the shell works:

You haven't told us which shell and which OS you use. If it is bash, a "\n" at the end of your output is implied and your construction is just superfluous, in Korn shell you should use the "print" command instead of the "echo" and your construction would still be superfluous.

The only thing you read is a stream of filenames and you do absolutely nothing with it, just put it into another file. You could do that without using a while loop, yes? Replace:

Code:

<some-stream-of-filenames> | while read FILES
        do
        echo $FILES >> $UPLOADDIR/DATA 2>>/dev/null
        if [ "$FILES" = "" ];then
          break
        fi
done

with

Code:

<some-stream-of-filenames> >> $UPLOADDIR/DATA

Another questionable thing is:

Code:

echo $FILES >> $UPLOADDIR/DATA 2>>/dev/null

You don't need to append to "/dev/null", because it has no content that needs to preserved (in fact no content at all), therefore:

Code:

echo $FILES >> $UPLOADDIR/DATA 2>/dev/null

Further, which output of "echo" should go there? There is none, therefore the redirection is superfluous:

Code:

echo $FILES >> $UPLOADDIR/DATA

Another thing is that filenames can contain whitespace in Unix. Whitespace is the field delimiter in shell, which is why it is wise to protect strings which could contain whitespace from the interpretation by the shell. Therefore:

Code:

echo "$FILES" >> "$UPLOADDIR/DATA"

Furthermore, you use a "break" to leave the loop once input is exhausted:

Code:

        if [ "$FILES" = "" ];then
          break
        fi

This is completely unnecessary, because you use "while read ..." "read" will return "FALSE" if the input ends and therefore the loop will be left automatically.

Finally: You always append to your output file ("$UPLOADDIR/DATA"). If you run the script several times you will have the output of your stream several times in your file. If you want to have only the results from one run in your file you will have to empty it prior to the loop, like this:

Code:

cat /dev/null > "$UPLOADDIR/DATA"
<some-stream-of-filenames> | while read FILES
        do
        echo $FILES >> $UPLOADDIR/DATA 2>>/dev/null
        if [ "$FILES" = "" ];then
          break
        fi
done

But again, the loop does nothing and a

Code:

<some-stream-of-filenames> > "$UPLOADDIR/DATA"

would do the same. In case you want to process the filenames in the loop somehow and you use Korn shell you should do it this way:

Code:

exec 3> "$UPLOADDIR/DATA"       # to create a new empty file
# exec 3>> "$UPLOADDIR/DATA"    # alternatively to append to the file

<some-stream-of-filenames> | while read FILES ; do
     print -u3 "$FILES"
done

exec 3>&-

I hope this helps.

bakunin