Well, I can always do that, as I did reference the post about split options and preserving empty trailing fields, but my question was specifically geared toward "is there a way to do that same thing with the -F option on the command line." Otherwise, yes, I can just break all this out and write a number of perl scripts using split directly. Just trying to keep this short and on a single line (as I'm doing other stuff I don't show in the example in the original post).