All the suggestions provided thus far don't work with grep version 2.5.1 on Red Hat 9. Although the original text file was written in dos I did use the following commands: set fileformat=unix and wq in vi to convert the text. I could also have used 1,$ s/^M/ / . -- Gllug mailing list - Gllug at gllug.org.uk http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug