No real help here, just some general comments. First, don't cd in a script. Use full paths - this includes defining paths to your programs (if you or someone else put a different program with the same name that is found earlier in your path, your script is liable to cause a big mess). Bash is nice and real powerful. However, when my bash scripts grow beyond a few lines, I evaluate my my sanity and use something more along the lines of programming (perl is my language of choice but some like python or ruby). BTW, my reasoning behind using something else when scripts get too big is: 1. Style - shell scripts look ugly as hell, 2. Speed - running all of those individual programs isn't very fast, 3. Functionality - I can do ten times more in three lines of perl than you can do in ten lines of bash. Etc, etc, etc.