First off, could you please use standard colour for your normal text, instead of red? If you use the proper tags ("quote", "code", like you did) it is easy to diffrentiate between question and answer and other colours may make it hard to read when usign different colour schemes. Thank you.

You are right. I just wanted to get a better picture of what can be expected as input for the script.

Just read the man page for ksh/bash (in this regard they work the same). You will find it under "variable expansion" or "parameter expansion" and it is basically a set of string-related functions with which you can extract sub-strings from variables. Example: i wrote in my first answer

Code:

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

This means: "$user_name" is loaded with the contents of "$line" up to the first "," - the same as your "cut -d',' -f1" - and "id_number" is loaded with "$line" from the first "," to the end. This will do the same as your "echo ... | cut" but without the necessity to start an external program. The difference might not be much in absolute time but calling an external program weighs in by a factor of about 100 compared to an internal shell-function. Do it often enough and you will see a very noticeable difference.

That is probably coming from the file "primery.txt" not being there. You once call the two files in this directory "primery.txt" and "secondry.txt" and the other time you call them "popular.txt" and "notpopular.txt" - what is it gonna be?

I hope this helps.

bakunin