Hi acidhawk, I really don't know how to get date from B.txt( if they have more than 100 lines..), so i think I will use shell cript to grep today date in add field and dump it in a temp file like B2.txt. Then use this perl program to look for all the $id in B2.txt and search in A.txt then replace adddate and expiredate. I am new and still need to learn from all of you. I found my error in not to use : (mistyping ;). Thanks for your help,