Shell Programming and Scripting

I really appreciate your help....The filesystems are locally mounted and there is no problem in the filesystem.

Well it will use whatever CPU it can get to get the job done (unless you want it to take all day!). But that doesn't mean your system can't do anything else (especially if you're using the "nice" option from danmero)

how about using for loop or splitting the files into smaller ones? do you think this might work?

Can you help me little with the for loop code as it will be my first time to use it.

It's not the size of the files, it's awk using the CPU to do its job.

I created your scenario (6 directories with 26 500K files - enen though there's only 24 hours in a day!) and it took 23 seconds to complete. The CPU was maxed, but so what? The system didn't just grind to a halt.

You really have nothing to worry about. If something else needs CPU, it will still get it.