On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:17:21PM -0700, Linda Walsh wrote: > dcl -xa _FPATH
Arrays cannot be exported. The bash manual explicitly says so: Array variables may not (yet) be exported. > } | ( ((!(remove||expire))) && hsort -s || cat) Use of the && and || operators together as a "shorthand" for if/then/else is dangerous. If the hsort command returns failure, the cat command will ALSO be executed. http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#pf22 Use an if command instead: ... } | if (( !(remove||expire) )); then hsort -s; else cat; fi Or even better: ... } | if ((remove||expire)); then cat; else hsort -s; fi Apart from those two things, I didn't really read the code. It was quite a bit larger than I expected. Those two problems were just the first ones I found. You may find it helpful to use "set -x" on the section of the code from which the error message is originating. Seeing the expanded command that generates the message may be sufficient to identify the error (assuming it's your error and not bash's). If it turns out to be a bug in bash, then having a smaller piece of code that can reproduce the bug will be useful.