Slow bash script

[Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com>]

The following script seems to run abnormally slow on a 400Mhz Sarge system, 
getting only about one iteration per second in the while loop.  It extracts 
md5sums from a 180k Packages file and makes an indices file.  I've narrowed down 
the  slowdown to the lines in the while loop starting with "search=..."
The system is otherwise unloaded and not swapping when I see the slowdown. 
Thanks in advance for any ideas or clues about the slowdown, or about how to 
speed up the loop.


mkdir /mnt/install/debian-multimedia/indices
find  /mnt/install/debian-multimedia/dists/etch/main/ |grep Packages |grep -v z 
|xargs cat| \
while read inputline
do
	search=`echo $inputline | grep Filename |cut -f 2 -d ' '`
        if [ "$search" != "" ]
	then
		filename=$search
	fi
	search=`echo $inputline | grep MD5 |cut -f 2 -d ' '`
        if [ "$search" != "" ]
        then
		nextline="$search $filename"
		echo $nextline
	fi
done |gzip >/mnt/install/debian-multimedia/indices/md5sums.gz