Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a command nested in some while loops to parse some data that looks something like this.

Code:

while ($condition)
  while ($condition)
    ...
    gzcat /dir/$fileName.gz | grep $searchString > out_file
  end
end

On the first loop, the command is executed properly (and takes maybe 10 seconds to finish). But on all subsequent loops, something happens and the command is not executed properly. I know this because the data I expect does not get output to "out_file" and the process takes a split second, whereas it should take the usual 10 seconds.

To make sure the command is not getting messed up during the looping, I put an echo just before the command is executed, so it looks like this.

Code:

while ($condition)
  while($condition)
    ...
    echo "gzcat /dir/$fileName.gz | grep $searchString > out_file"
    gzcat /dir/$fileName.gz | grep $searchString > out_file
  end
end

The echo gives me what I expect.

Code:

gzcat /dir/file1.gz | grep string1 > out_file
gzcat /dir/file2.gz | grep string2 > out_file
gzcat /dir/file3.gz | grep string3 > out_file

If I run those 3 commands in a row at the prompt manually, I get the results I expect. But inside the script, only the first loop of the command gets the results. Any ideas what could be happening?

Thanks,
hobbers

Hi
Try to insert the instruction
between the commands

Cheers

Do the following and prvide me with your feedback please:-

Code:

while ($condition)
  while ($condition)
    ...
    gzcat /dir/$fileName.gz | grep $searchString >> out_file &
    wait
  end
end

This caused the script to stop after the first command.

This works. But after further investigation, it may have also been a file availability problem with the *.gz files.

Thanks.