I suppose your master file has unique lines and doesn not contain doubles like with "adamsandler" from your example. Is it so?

Your script has several rather weak spots. Lets go over them one by one:

The first thing is you do not explicitly state a shell to be used. This is not an error, but why take chances? Always state in the first line your intended shell with a "shebang": "#! /path/to/your/shell". I will use "/bin/ksh" in my examples, but change that to whatever you really want to use.

Then:

Code:

   user_name=$(echo $line | cut -d, -f1)
   id_number=$(echo $line | cut -d, -f2)

You first read in a line, then spend several commands to split this line. You can save an awful lot of execution time by using shell variable expansion instead of "cut":

Code:

user_name="${line%%,*}"
id_number="${line##*,}"

but even faster and saving even more would be to let the shell itself do the splitting by redefining the IFS so that word splitting is done implicitly:

Code:

while IFS=',' read user_name id_number ; do
    ....
done < /path/to/master.file

Another point is:

Code:

main_directory=$(find /usr/myproject/sample -type d -name $user_name)

The output of "find" would be several lines if "/usr/myproject/sample/$user_name" would contain a subdirectory or several subdirectories) with the username. Consider the following directory structure:

/usr/myproject/sample/adamsandler
/usr/myproject/sample/adamsandler/adamsandler

Furthermore you do not take any precautions against the directory missing at all. Instead of finding a directory you already know to be there you could just construct its name and then test against it (see "-d" option of "test"):

Code:

#! /bin/ksh

while IFS=',' read user_name id_number ; do
     main_dir="/usr/myproject/sample/$user_name"
     if [ -d "$main_dir" ] ; then
          print - "The directory $main_dir exists."
     else
          print - "something went wrong, $main_dir does not exist."
     fi
     ...
done < /path/to/master.file

Next point:

Code:

lines_in_popular=$(wc -l $main_directory/popular.txt | awk '{print $1 ;}')

This is an awful complicated way of getting the number of lines, isn't it? The following is a bit shorter and probably faster:

Code:

lines_in_popular=$(sed -n '$ =' $main_directory/popular.txt)

It would also help to declare "lines_in_popular" to be of type integer before:

Code:

#! /bin/ksh

typeset -i lines_in_popular=0

while IFS=',' read user_name id_number ; do
main_dir="/usr/myproject/sample/$user_name"
     if [ -d "$main_dir" ] ; then
          print - "The directory $main_dir exists."
     else
          print - "something went wrong, $main_dir does not exist."
          continue
     fi

     lines_in_popular=$(sed -n '$ =' $main_directory/popular.txt)
     ...
done < /path/to/master.file

Finally, you use "code" but it is neither declared nor given any content. Should that read "id_number" instead?

Code:

   if [ $lines_in_popular -lt 5 ] ; then
      echo $code >> $main_directory/popular.txt ;
   else
      echo $code >> $main_directory/notpopular.txt ;
   fi

And you speak about "primery.txt" (sic!) and "secondry.txt" (sic!) but here you use "popular" and "notpopular" - is that a typo too or intended?

I hope this helps.

bakunin