How about dropping the calls to ls and gawk, and getting the list of files to iterate over in Perl? 

opendir DH, '.' or die "Couldn't open dir: $!" ;
my @files = sort { $a cmp $b }
            map  { ( split /\./ )[0] }
            grep { /\.pdl$/ } readdir DH ;
close DH ;

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_______________
DamnDirtyApe 
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who
would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
            --Friedrich Nietzsche

In reply to Re: Problem with awk by DamnDirtyApe
in thread Problem with awk by Sara

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