Your script is creating 3 XML tags per PDF file in the rss_body function:Should there be a </link> tag after the data you insert following the <link> tag?

Please show an explicit example of the data that you want created for the following PDF file:

Code:

-rw-r--r--  1 dwc  staff  2895323 Oct 23  2013 /var/www/html/Intranet/pdf/IEEE/20601-Rev-D7r02-clean.pdf

Your current code is creating one XML file for each different final directory name in the PDF pathnames found. One of these XML files is created for each PDF file found. If another PDF file with the same final directory name is found, it overwrites the previous XML file. (This is just slow if there is only one directory under $SYSDIR with that name. If there are two or more directories with the same final component name, there could be several problems.)

Furthermore, if there are more PDF files than xargs will process in a single invocation of ls your files will NOT be sorted from newest to oldest; there will be groups of PDF files sorted in timestamp order, but the complete list might not be correctly ordered. So, to get a time ordered list of files we either need to gather data needed for each file into single lines in a file that we can sort by timestamp, or we need to create files in a single directory with the same timestamps as your PDF files that we can then sort us ls -t. Creating a single file will probably be faster if you have an easy way to convert file timestamps into text. If not, we can use touch to copy file timestamps to other files.

Does your system have a stat utility?