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Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 01:06:06 +0200
From: Mario Hoerich <lists@MHoerich.de>
To: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>
Message-ID: <20050405230605.GA93190@Pandora.MHoerich.de>
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cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Bourn Shell Scripts that Produce Multiple Files
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# Martin McCormick:
> 	I wrote a Bourn Shell script which has a while loop in it that
> reads a file line by line.  The output of the script is supposed to go
> to a file with a different name for each iteration of the loop.  This
> scheme is obviously a rotten idea because all the new files end up
> created, but quite empty.  If I take out the > $newfilename.txt
> directive, I get the proper output at stdout so the only problem is
> with changing the file name in the middle of the game several times.

This sounds a bit like a truncation issue.

If you do something like
    
    command1 > bar
    # some code
    command2 > bar

then the second redirect will truncate the file to 0 bytes
before redirecting the output from command2 into it.

Try using >> instead of >, as it appends to the file.

If this doesn't help, please post the script (or a simplified
version thereof).  We're not clairvoyant, you know... :)

 HTH,
Mario