"Thought you were "going to work," liar" Oooohhhhh, I thought that you meant it was the undocumented that didn't do any work, not me! Well, I am kinda jumping back & forth. Here, debug this, willya: if [ $UT -eq 0 ] then exit elif [ $UT -eq 1 ] then ls / > /tmp/dirlist.$SUFFIX elif [ $UT -eq 2 ] then grep -v '^#' $CLDIRFILE > /tmp/dirlist .$SUFFIX else exit fi See the bug?