I'm wondering why you are testing $ECL (which should be a string unless you're not showing the grep options you are using) for numerical equality with ""? Wouldn't that always be true or am I missing something here?

Update: Ok, I understand what you want, but you'd better put an eq in there instead of == as ANY string will match "" numerically (i.e. "a456" == "" is true). The only case where that won't be true is where $ECL contains a number or a string starting with a number which is then interpreted as a plain number in the numeric context, but all you are really trying to do is see if $ECL is empty, so use eq. If your data file is ever changed so the lines start with a non-number, your code will no longer work.

Actually if you ran your code with -w you'd get: Argument "" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at line xxx.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser