Try putting an 'echo something' in the loop to see if the loop's running at all.
Too many <<< after grep when one or none would do? Or is that a bash-ism?
It's a "here string" (one-liner "here document"-style thing). A bash- / ksh93-ism
Maybe there are funny lines in the playlist?
If you really want to know who is doing what, there is truss -fae ! Faster than debug statements, and educational.
---------- Post updated at 03:47 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:09 PM ----------
Seems kinda wild for this simple sed/shell, but it was a bash challenge. I think someone was a byte short, or did the req creep? This has a stdout free of prompts and such, but is sed metachar sensitive. One might use sed/cut to trim the key field out, grep to find interesting line numbers, and then pull the lines from the original.
echo 'Enter name to search: \c' >/dev/tty
read n
sed '
h
s/^.\{11\}\(.\{15\}\).*/\1/
/'"$n"'/{
g
p
}
d
' playerlist