Well, it turns out this isn't working once I put it all into the existing loop.

It keeps hanging and I thought it was the IFS... So removed it and replaced the for with a more traditional for using a counter. This seems to let it loop longer.

I'm testing without the wgets to the server and just pulling the XML data. I can loop a full count of 86 items without an issue if I'm just tossing the data into a variable as I pasted above. This was causing a hang before with the other loop.

But now if I put back the code to echo the contents of that variable to files (a different file for every pass of the loop) it hangs again well before completing. It seems to hang at a random point - a different pass each time I run it.

Am I looping too fast and trying to create too many files too quickly?

I just tried with a "sleep 1" after the file output and the first time it got through 13 passes of the loop. The second time 27 passes.

This is getting really annoying.