Shell Programming and Scripting

Indeed, the 5 seconds was only a suggestion, good thing you fine-tuned the interval so that it works reliably. I am not sure, is it OK like this or are you still confused about something?

It is a great thing to have a log file or else I never would have thought about that.

I'm confused to why the file is not created right away like it was before (even though it was not 100%) anymore. How does what we added change the file being created?

Why does the file take 15 seconds or so to show up after my program says it is complete? I know you probably are not familiar with the software but from my understanding of your code...

if the file is there then it gives an exit status of 0 and it goes into while loop which keeps checking the file until the old and new filesizes match. I don't see how the checking of the file has anything to do with the Compressor and the file not showing up or the delay of it showing up after completion.

Last thing, when the script is run a beach ball comes which restricts me clicking on things like my desktop items or whatever. This never happens with my other scripts. Do you see any reason why this is happening? I thought maybe it is because of the "&" in the script but I removed them and the wait and it still does it. Any ideas?

I think the compress script is calling yet another program which it runs in the background. It does not wait for it to be finished however, and exits instead.
So when the compress script finishes with exit code 0, the actual program is still running in the background and the file is being created and is growing in size.

What we added does not change the file being created, but 'watches' it to see if the growing of he size of the file has stopped, i.e. two consecutive file size samples are the same. If the size no longer increases the script exits the wait loop and goes on to start quicktime.

I presume the beach ball means that your system is using 100% CPU while creating the file?

O.K. I solved the beach ball problem. I have OMCEdit which allows me to do the context menus and get the variables and that was running the script in silent mode(popen)...I changed it to do Shell Script and it fixed it.

Thank you so much for your help. I have been trying to solve this for a couple months now and I couldn't find any solution. You are a real asset to this forum. Thanks so much.