KSH for loop works on Solaris/Mac but not on Red Hat Linux -

the following ksh script gives me "no such file or directory" error message on red hat linux system. has solution?

#!/usr/bin/ksh f in `cat files.dat`   wc $f done 

for example, files.dat has 3 lines of data , each line file in current directory script running from.

a.c a.h b.c 

note, same loop generated same error message if running command line too.

it works on solaris/mac box not on red hat system.

thanks.

instead of for ... cat, should use

while read -r f     wc "$f" done < files.dat 

and should use $() instead of backticks when need command substitution.

but problem files a.c, etc., not there, have different names, invisible characters in names, or line endings in files.dat cr/lf (dos/windows-style) instead of \n (lf - unix-style) or there odd characters in file otherwise.