Shell Programming and Scripting

Okay this is a mess, I'm trying to assign variables with variables in a for-loop. Here is what i have for code. The syntax is not good.

Given the following script:

#! /bin/csh

foreach site (ABC DEF GHI)

eval set \t$${site}sf = ``wc -l \$${site}.sf | awk '{print $1}'``
eval set \$${site}sf = ``expr t\$${site}sf - 1``

eval echo $site \$${site}sf

end

exit 0

I'm using eval because i'm assigning a variable with a variable. Kind of a mess, but what i'm doing is counting the lines in the file "file.sf" assigning that to the variable "t$sitesf", using expr to subtact 1, then assigning that variable to $sitesf. This works if i don't use a for-loop and just type out each one seperately, but i have like 30 different sites, so a for loop is desirable. In short, i want the number of lines, minus one, from the file $site.sf. I'm getting the error:

ABCsf: Undefined variable.
ABCsf: Undefined variable.

Any Suggestions??

Decompose the statement. Keep stuff simple with eval. I don't know csh very well, so I going to just guess at the syntax. Is ABC.sf the name of a file? Or is ABC.sf the name of a variable containing the actual filename? I cannot tell which it is from your post. So I'm guessing ABC.sf is the name of the file.

foreach site (ABC DEF GHI)
set filename=${site}.sf

No eval is needed in this case! Now if you do "wc -l < $filename" instead of "wc -l $filename", wc will not output a filename and you will just get a number. And csh can do arithmetic without using expr. This is much faster. Trying this out, I seem to need spaces as I show below...

set count=`wc -l $filename`
@ count = $count - 1
eval set \$t${site}sf=$count

Thanks your suggestion worked great. I just had to add an awk command for wc -l to get the first field, but it worked great in the end. My script went from 1025 lines to 452, much better. Thanks