ww - Of course you are correct. Although I have taken Perl courses and have most of the OReilly books the occasion to actually write perl scripts never presented itself in my job until now. Scripting / Programming is like learning any foreign language - after reading several books about learning spanish I still have not gotten beyond Cerveza Por Favor because I am not in an environment where spanish is actually spoken and therefore I don't retain it. If bash were acceptable I could have managed this in a few minutes using a for loop in conjunction with awk, sed and grep but alas I must learn Perl. - Thanks for your reply. - pbyfire = Perl By Fire