I have bee playing with this script for a while and I can't seem to find the magic to make it work right. The script basically takes all the avi files in in a folder and converts them to flash. Here is the simple script: #!/bin/sh ls *.avi|cut -d. -f1 | while read i do echo "this is the file "$i ffmpeg -i $i.avi -ar 22050 -f flv ./flv/$i.flv done The script does the first file it finds and then exits with no errors. If I comment out the ffmpeg line it runs as expected though all the files. Oh, I need to allow for spaces in the file names as well. Any ideas?