Thanks Dave,

I will read as recommended. As an aside, I appreciate your help. Using \b...\b worked perfectly.

For those who care, I am building an application that will parse sar files on any UNIX machine running sar (aix, solaris, hp-ux, sgi, linux, etc.) and either:

1) create a graph of user selected data (selected by option & date(s)

2) apply performance tuning rules for that specific OS (version & OS) based upon en expert system & rules base.

This question dealt directly with the rules base, namely converting:

((0 < SML_MEM_FAIL ) or (0 < LG_MEM_FAIL ) or (0 < OVSZ_MEM_FAIL )) and ( FREEMEM <= 64 )

without being to picky about spaces and the such.

thanks

g