Shell Programming and Scripting

In a directory I have two lists, all files which could contain certain fields (they all share copied code) and a list of fields. My two scripts are

Code:

<appl.list xargs grep $1
 

where appl.list contains files (source programs) with the fields. This script is named YY

Code:

<fields.list xargs YY
 

appl.list contains file names like

Code:

ACCTMANT.cbl
ACCTPRT.cbl
ACCTPRTHS.cbl

while field.list looks like

Code:

FIELD-1
FIELD-2

When I run it, it finds only four references but when I run YY (by hand) field by field, it finds much more.

Any help would be appreciated. TIA

If you're making multiple script files of 1 line each to get around a shell 'limitation' you've probably taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Your "YY" script is a forkbomb which would call itself recursively until you ran into process or memory limits or your computer hit swapdeath. You haven't shown how you're running it. Your data files are so short as to be useless for example purposes. So I think you really oversimplified things when posting it here.

But I think I figured out what you're trying to do... You're looking for .cbl files containing the strings FIELD-1, FIELD-2, etc -- yes?

If so:

Code:

xargs grep -F -f field.list < app.list

Thanks for looking at it.

When I tried it, it listed all lines in all programs instead of just those containing selected fields.

Give me some example data to work with here. Something that will produce actual output.