I also replied back in the general forum. It does in fact work for awk but i need to make substitutions with sed actually so it complicates things. Is there a way to pipeline the output from awk into sed and change it that way? It would be easiest to see my other post
As for that little perl program, im totally perl illiterate! Ive only used C++ and assembly and im trying to learn shell programming for linux and unix now. Maybe ill get to perl eventually though. hehe, thanks for the help though!