well I understand and I agree that I will have to execute in a loop, what I am trying to learn is a way to create the while loop inside the perl world and not issue thousands of invocations to perl from a straight unix ksh loop, if you understand what I mean.
So can you please illustrate for me how can I structure an invocation statement(s) to perl with an incoming file name, an output file name and the real while loop as the core of what I will ask perl to execute for me?