Well after tinckering with it some more i came up with this, which I think is already getting a bit $obfuscated: perl -we '$tty=qx(tty);$tty=~s/^\W\w+\W(.*)/$1/;print $tty' By the way, I wanted to thank all of those who have taken the time to ponder on my node. This is needless to say a great community. I'm glad I stumbled into it, though I'm yet to find out the turns that have around.