My comment about the Netscape 4.7 is valid though. It looks fine but when you hit 'New Reply', this box ("Your Reply") is a tiny little square in the corner of area and all the buttons for the vB Code are lined up along the edge in that area...weird. I would always have to flip to IE to be able to type any replies.

In any case, my test was to see if grep would be better at handling certain tests for 'existence' and it was definitely slower.

As I started to remove the grep and replace the validation with an if-then statement, my script would finish faster and faster until it just seemed to scroll by/dump the results instanteously...

I changed lines like below. I have many other test conditions that are not this simple, but this is an example:

echo $catcd | grep -Eq '^[[:digit:]][[:digit:]][[:digit:]]$'
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
...
fi

to:

if [[ $catcd != +([0-9]) ]]; then
..
fi

Your point is valid and that's why I didn't continue this post because you guys answered my questions about the reading of the records, etc. I just wanted to revisit this post to say the thing about the Netscape and tell everyone what I found in my little test. I was surprised at the difference in time of execution (between 3-4 seconds to 5-8 minutes for 1000 records) between grepping and just using an if-then in this case, that's all. I didn't think the time would be so far apart. It was almost 1 sec for each record to be validated in some cases...

Gianni