Originally Posted by Don Cragun

Hi jeffs42885,
Expanding slightly on what RudiC has already said...

I do not have any idea of what you are trying to do. The loop you have shown us above has one item to be processed, and, therefore, invokes loadutility once. There is no file parsing nor filename parsing indicated in your loop and you haven't specified any reason why you might want to throw awk into your loop.

Assuming that (without.index extension) in the code in post #1Make was intended to be a comment (which it is not any any shell language I'm aware of), your loop can be replaced by the single command:

Code:

loadutility -flag1 FIELD1 -flag2 FIELD2 -flag3 FIELD3  FIELD1.FIELD2.FIELD3.FIELD4 < filelist.del

I assume that is this not what you're trying to do, but I can't figure out from your description what it is that you do want to do if it is not to execute the above single command.

I have also never heard of the loadutility utility, but the options you are passing to it seem strange unless you intend for flag1 through flag3 to be variable single-letter options each of which takes an option-argument (but, if that was the case you should have -$flag1 through -$flag3.

Please tell us what operating system you're using, what shell you're using, and provide us with a much clearer statement of what you are trying to do.

And then we see your post #3 which doesn't really help at all? Why is the .index that you said had to be deleted not deleted from any of the invocations of loadutility?

What happened to -flag1 FIELD1 in your invocations of loadutility?

What is special about the filename starting with file3 that the first <period> in its name has to be removed when it is passed to loadutility as an operand?

You aren't the only one that is stumped!