Thanks for the input.
The reason why, well.. I'm at work like most people here who post problems, and there's a script that runs in a job... to extract certain info from a flatfile. Basically, I'm just modifying a current shell script. From trial and error, I've been learning AWK now... but thought that maybe others here have had to do something with AWK and have infused Perl in some way. I didn't want an answer to my specific code, just to see if others have experienced this and how they went about it.

Thanks again and thanks in advance to anyone else who posts here.

brother Zo