Shell Programming and Scripting

I found the issue. I had made a mistake from the first to second line. There was supposed to be a space in front of Atom and I made the correction on the first line but not the second. I was also missing the #!. The other question I have concerns this temporary file. Is there going to be a problem with read/write access via all users other than root?

Yes, you could put rm /tmp/t1.x after using the temporary file, to allay any concerns about some file cluttering up the tmp directory.

Here is something else I would suggest. You can save a copy of the log file, say like cp atoms.log atoms.save command. Then, run the script to make the changes, create the corrected atoms.log file, and do the processing. Finally, run diff atoms.log atoms.save and scroll through the output to verify it only changed the lines you wanted it to change, that there was not some unexpected side effect.

Everything is spot on with the 'diff' between the original and corrected file. Thank you for your time and effort. Hopefully our efforts can help others with the same problem.