Wow Choroba that's great. You wrote that very quickly. Thanks ever so much. This looks like this will do exactly what I am looking for. Yes you are right there can only be one TYPE* and FILE* associated with each JOBID. Once I get these values for each JOBID I ultimately need to supply these values as arguments to a program and execute it. So when reading the first JOBID. I need the value for TYPE1 and FILE1 and with these I then execute another program with those values. Then once that has been executed I then read the next JOBID in the file and get the values for TYPE2 and FILE2 and then with those values execute another program again. And keep doing this until there are no more JOBID's defined in this file.