Hi, I want to print out ALL the words that appears more than N times from a file call "foo.txt", this is what i got: foo.txt: a b c e g o z a g a a a (assume that foo.txt only has 1 coloumn) now this is the command i got to do the job: (note that i asume that N=2 in this case) cat foo.txt | grep -v grep | grep -v awk| awk '{print $NF}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 2' however, if i put this in a script and i want to replace "2" by $variable, awk does not understand it cos $variable does not get imported ti AWK program... !!!! I heard that there is a way to pass a variable as an argument to AWK, right ? If so, i certainly can pass $variable to awk in this case. IF anyone knows about this, please let me know ASAP Thanks Brian

Try cat foo.txt | sort | uniq -c | awk -v x=4 '{ if ( $1 > x ) print $2 }' replace x=4 with x=$shell_var to make it an input in the script. Sean