 <p>You don't say precisely what you're trying to do, but I can say with a great deal of confidence you are doing it wrong. From your code, I'll guess that <code>emailTranscript.txt</code> contains a form letter and <code>nameAddresses.csv</code> contains the data to be substituted in. </p> <p>The biggest error, and the one I suspect is your problem, is that <code>-F</code> specifies the field separator. You want <code>-v</code>, to set a variable. </p>