And even if grep of a directory made sense, the commands at the end of the pipeline:

Code:

grep -c filename.$DATE.TXT | grep TRL | wc -l

will always return 0; never 1. The grep -c output will always be a numeric string (that cannot contain the string TRL) and wc -l reading from an empty pipe will always return 0.

Therefore, this loop in your code:

Code:

#this bit waits for the file to finish generating
while [ $mytest15 -ne 1 ]
do
mytest15=`cat /pathtofile/ | grep -c filename.$DATE.TXT | grep TRL | wc -l`
sleep 180
done

cannot ever complete. It is an infinite loop unless the while loop is failing with a syntax error because $mytest expands to an empty string the first time through the loop yielding a syntax error on:

Code:

[ -ne 1 ]

but, since you said it is working successfully when you run it in the foreground, there obviously were not any diagnostic messages printed. So, we have to assume that part of the code you chose not to show us predefined mytest to have the value 1 before the above loop was executed.

If you want to know whether or not a file contains the string TRL, you would not do that with:

Code:

mytest15=`cat /pathtofile/filename | grep -c filename.$DATE.TXT | grep TRL | wc -l`

either. You might want to try a simpler loop like:

Code:

#this bit waits for the file to finish generating
while ! grep -q TRL /pathtofile/filename
do	sleep 180
done