On Fri, 8 May 2009 09:58:46 -0700 MHR wrote:
If you're asking these kinds of questions, a basic primer on how to use bash, and shell scripting in general, seems to be in order. It never hurts to have good manuals around if you are not thoroughly familiar with a particular paradigm, and it makes for handy reference in the future. You will (and did) get lots of help here, but you'll run into more and mroe of this as you go, and these kinds of issues are frequently covered in detail in a good manual.
O'Reilly book:
Learning the Bash Shell - Newham & Rosenblatt
ISBN 978-0-596-00965-6