Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all..

I'm not a scripter but I'm trying to set up a mail script that emails out once a file has been written to.
Is there some way of writing a while read loop or something, so that it reads each line of the file and then ends when a specific number of lines have been written...

We're going to have 10 or 20 scripts that write to the file saying
script_1 started at $(date)
script_2 started at $(date)
script_1 ended at $(date)
and so on..

I don't know whether I should put some sort of trigger in the file to indicate that its the end of the file or because i know how many lines will be there just to put some sort of counter in the loop.

Edit: Using .ksh

Here you can try this...



DATE=`/bin/date '+%m%d%y'`
MESSAGE="Found Error on XYZ "
MAILTO="A-team"
cd /home/alert
errfile="/home/alert/alert.2b.txt"
if [[ -e ${errfile} ]] ; then
cat $errfile | mailx -s "$MESSAGE" $MAILTO
fi
mv /home/alert/alert.2b.txt /home/alert/alert.2b.txt_$DATE

Ok your code works but its not exatly what I'm lookin for.. What the script to continuously look in the file and email out when a new line has been found.. the script will then email out the first word of the new line

I've tried to to it this way but no luck

Code:

OUTPATH=/home/out
PARMFILE=$OUTPATH/jobcount_test.txt
LOG=$OUTPATH/job_count_monthlymail_log.txt
HLOG=$OUTPATH/job_count_monthlymail_hlog.txt
#
echo " started at $(date)" > $LOG
#
integer count=0
while [[ $count < 2 ]]
do
   body_msg=`tail -1 $PARMFILE`
   mailx -s "$body_msg" jarrathy@notes < $body_msg
   ((count = count +1))

done
##
echo " ended at $(date)" >> $LOG
cat $LOG >> $HLOG

I was updating the jobcount_test.txt and was hoping when i had two lines in there the job would stop but it didn't.. can someone tell me what i'm doing wrong?