Thanks for the info graff, the use of an expression grep "/^" in the middle of my arguement will only report back the line of output in the df -k that has a slash that is immediately followed by an end of line tag (anchor)- thereby only returning the root partition, as opposed to only doing a basic grep for a slash, which will return every slice starting with a slash (working in ksh).
Is there any way I can incorporate your 'one-liner' into my script? As this is only one function out of several that needs to be performed.