That works beautifully, I am more than thank full. Which lead to a different problem in the script, now my awk line isn't working. I assume the issue is that the system I am working on doesn't have cgywin installed. Anyone have a quick perl one liner to put quotes at the begining of a line then the end? thank you all very much, to me being a novice with varying languages and limited scripting skills leaves alot of this up to being simply black majik, and Perl has many functions in blackboxes which I don't fully understand.