> I spoke to soon.. after looking at the help you need cut -f not cut -c.. > but it does what I need it to do.. thanks You said "columns" (-c), not "fields" (-f) in your original email. Columns don't work so good if you have tab characters in the file. But that's what commands like 'expand' are for. :-) (I don't need no steek'n perl/awk/python/... for most things ;) - BS