0,0,"NBSC",12,"24/02/2004 15:35:34","RD","2.2"
1,1,"ORG-UNIT-TYPE","C",1,"13/03/1997 17:24:49","PO"
1,2,"ORG-UNIT-TYPE","C",2,"13/03/1997 17:24:49","Client"
1,3,"ORG-UNIT-HIST","C",3,"13/03/1997 17:24:49","PON"

The task is to look at the 3rd field of each line, and extract the
whole line if the third field matches the criteria.
The criteria is to extract all lines that have the 3rd field set to
the value of "NBSC" to a separate text file.
Similarly to extract all lines, to another separate file, that have
the 3rd field set to the value of "ORG-UNIT-HIST".
All lines with 3rd field set to, "ORG-UNIT-TYPE" are to be ignored.

The psuedo code that I have come up with so far is shown below,

while read -r rec_type
do
    NEXT=`echo ${rec_type} | cut -f 3 -d,`
    if "${NEXT}" = "NBSC" then
        write to text file1
    else
        if "${NEXT}" = "ORG-UNIT-HIST" then
           write to text file 2
        fi
    fi
done < foo2

Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in
antcipation

    If there are no commas within quotes, the task is not hard. The
    easiest way would be to use awk:

awk -F, '
   $3 == "\"NBSC\"" { print > "NBSC-file" }
   $3 == "\"ORG-UNIT-HIST\""  { print > "ORG-UNIT-HIST-file" }
' foo2

    If you really want to use a while loop:

exec 3> ORG-UNIT-HIST-filex
exec 4> NBSC-filex
IFS=,
while IFS= read -r line
do
   set -- $line
   case $3 in
      \"NBSC\") echo "$line" >&4 ;;
      \"ORG-UNIT-HIST\")  echo "$line" >&3 ;;
   esac
done < foo2

--
    Chris F.A. Johnson                  http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell
    ===================================================================
    My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2004, Chris F.A. Johnson
    and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

You're almost there, why did you stop?
If you're troubled with writing to files, try echo with append, i.e.

if [ "${NEXT} = \"NBSC\" ]
    then echo ${rec_type} >> file1

--
A. Alper Atycy
PGP key @ http://pks.gpg.cz:11371/pks/lookup?op=index&search=0xB824F550