You're so close, just off by one character. When you use a character other than / as the delimiter in a BRE search pattern, you have to escape the first use of that character with a backslash (i.e., \). So, if you change:

Code:

   sed "#${datafile}#d" ${source} > ${source}.tmp

to:

Code:

   sed "\#${datafile}#d" ${source} > ${source}.tmp

it works.

Note, however, that there is no need to use awk to split fields from the lines you read from list.err. There are several things you can do to get the same results without needing to use a command substitution invoking awk (which is a rather costly and slow way of doing what you want to do). One easy way is to let read do the field splitting for you since you're already calling it. For example, if you change:

Code:

while read line
do
   let count=$count+1
   datafile=`echo $line | awk -F":" '{ print $1 }'`

in all places in your script where it occurs to:

Code:

while IFS=':' read datafile line
do
   let count=$count+1

you'll get the same results.