It sounds like everyone is trying to over-complicate it with perl/awk/python when a simple "cut" command will do the job. > Well.. to lessen the burden it is a simple parse Column1, 2, 3 to file X cut -c1-3 infile > file-x > then parse column1, 20,30 to file Y.. cut -c1,20,30 infile > file-y > the program I am going to import these > files into will not handle the file as a whole.. - BS