Hi Dave,
OK. So now we know that you are not stupid (and please do not say that you are again) and, if you try to make some changes on your own, you get most of it right. As I said before, if you make an honest effort to do the work on your own, we are happy to help you with problems if you get stuck. Just don't expect us to do everything for you when you should be able to do most of it on your own.

The only real problem you have left is that you changed the printf command format argument to a fixed string (the date and timestamp) instead of adding another %s argument to the format string and adding the date and timestamp data in the appropriate spot in the argument list.

What happens if you change:

Code:

		then	printf "$now" '|ALERT2|ATS|chk_dirs.pl@mhappmmap001:Invalid file "%s" in "%s"\n' "$file" "$dir"

to:

Code:

		then	printf '%s|ALERT2|ATS|chk_dirs.pl@mhappmmap001:Invalid file "%s" in "%s"\n' "$now" "$file" "$dir"

or, to avoid lines in your script getting wider than 80 characters:

Code:

		then	printf '%s|%s file "%s" in "%s"\n' "$now" \
			    'ALERT2|ATS|chk_dirs.pl@mhappmmap001:Invalid' \
			    "$file" "$dir"

(Note that this assumes that you want one line of output per invalid file instead of the three lines of output shown in post #46.)

And, since you no longer need to keep track of whether or not an invalid file is found in a directory (since you no longer want to print a message if all files in a directory are valid), there is no need to reset the bad_found variable in each directory-processing loop nor to update it when an invalid file is found. So, you might want to see if the slightly simpler:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
config='/home/abainzd/dave.conf'
log='/ats/1.0.0/pst/release/logs/events.log'
now="$(date +'%d/%m/%Y_%X')"

while read dir pattern
do	cd "$dir" && for file in *
	do	if [ -f "$file" ] && ! /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -Fq "$pattern" "$file"
		then	printf '%s|%s file "%s" in "%s"\n' "$now" \
			    'ALERT2|ATS|chk_dirs.pl@mhappmmap001:Invalid' \
			    "$file" "$dir"
		 fi
	done
done < "$config" >> "$log"

works for you.

Note, however, that the date and time format string you said was your standard output format in post #44 showed a date in the format MM/DD/YYYY and the output your are producing above is in the format DD/MM/YYYY. I assume you can change the date command format string in your script if you want to switch the order of the month and day numbers in your output.