Thanks for the suggestion; I had that in my first version of the script -- but unfortunately double quoting $_ doesn't resolve the issue. Rather, when the argument is supplied to grep it some how breaks the argument into to separate ones, in spite of the variable being double quoted. For example, if the $_ variable held Jon Doe -- the error would be:

grep Jon: No such file or directory  
grep Doe: No such file or directory
[download]

Do you have any other suggestions? Thanks. -Dan