Thank you very much for your advice. I have tried your suggestion and it does indeed work very well. However, it has made me realise that my question was ill considered. My problem is actually as follows: I have an 8 character wide field into which I must round a number (possibly with a decimal point, possibly not). I need to be able to say, "Take this number, and round it so that, including it's decimal point, if it has one, and any zeros, is only 8 characters long". I have tried using $num = sprintf "%8g", $num; but this seems to give me a 7 character long number with a space at the front. Thank you once again for your advice and any further help you can offer.

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