Not sure how to go about the comma separated bit. There’s a lot of pipes and grep going on there

I believe a minor tweak needs to occur in the “year check” section and you need to define “the_list or change it to something else. I’ve tried several things, but i’m a complete newbie and I”m out of ideas. I’ve pasted the code below so you can see the section i’m talking about.

Any help would be fabulous.

–if the list contains January see if the selected month comes before or after January. Adjust the year accordingly.
on yearCheck(selected_month, the_months)
if the_months contains “Jan” then
repeat with x from 1 to count of the_months
if item x of the_list contains selected_month then
set the_num to x
else
if item x of the_list contains “Jan” then
set jan_num to x
end if
end if
end repeat
set year_check to (the_num – jan_num)
if year_check is greater than 0 then
set the_year to ((year of (current date)) – 1)
else
set the_year to (year of (current date))
end if
else

I set the external drive’s sharing preferences so that only the new sharing-only user and administrators could access it. I now want the host machine itself to use the the same drive for its own Time Machine backup. I logged into a non-administrator user, and I was properly prevented from looking at the drive. However, that also meant there wasn’t a way for me to mount the drive as I do on the remote machine. However again, I went into Time Machine in that non-admin user, and the drive appeared as one of the disks I could select, though now with the “plain metal” icon instead of the FireWire icon like the other drives in the daisy chain. I was able to select it for Time Machine use without ever having to enter the sharing-only user’s password.

Is that an error? Have I configured something incorrectly? Or perhaps is it because, once I’d used an admin password to unlock Time Machine system preferences, I now had proper access to that drive, at least for Time Machine purposes, even though I was doing all this while logged into the Mac as a non-admin user?