Thank you for both replies. I apologize for not responding sooner and for bumping a thread so long after it was replied to. A family emergency prevented (or, at least distracted from) replying sooner. The suggestions are now being turned into a working solution.

One question, though... Since the separator of choice, "|", follows both the factors at the beginning of the line and each of the subsequent trial entries, wouldn't only one existent trial be preserved from the file? Suppose there's a line:

8,6|NO,47,6.110|NO,47,3.910

Wouldn't $factor be "8,6" and $trial be "NO,47,6.110", the first trial? It seems like the second would be discarded and no more than 2 trials would ever be preserved. But I could easily be reading wrong. If not, though, perhaps I would be better off with a file structure like:

Code:

factor1,factor2|trial1|trial2|...|trialn

and IFS=":". What think ye? Again, many thanks.