I need a script to read records from a file, strip everything up to and including the first "," character from the record, then write the record to another file. Thanks, Pete

@echo off > output.txt for /F "tokens=1,* delims=," %%j in ('type "input.txt"') do echo.%%k>> output.txt

Thanks for the quick response, that helps me out a lot! Pete

if you have gawk for windows (see my sig) c:\test> gawk -F"," "{$1=\"\";}{sub(/^,/,\"\")}1" OFS="," file.txt GNU win32 packages | Gawk

Thanks for both replies. One follow up question - can the changed data be written back to the same file rather than output to a different file? Thanks, Pete

Sorry, one more thing on this. Is there a way to check if the input file exists before executing the commands? I'm finding that if the input file does not exist, an empty output file is created which causes problems. Thanks, Pete

:: MYCOPY.BAT Usage: mycopy "Pathname_Filename" @echo off if not exist "%~1" (echo.File "%~1" not found & goto :EOF) type nul > "%~dpn1.tmp" for /F "tokens=1,* delims=," %%j in ('type "%~1"') do echo.%%k>> "%~dpn1.tmp" del "%~1" ren "%~dpn1.tmp" "%~1" echo.File "%~1" was copied and edited. :: End_Of_Batch example: mycopy "C:\Documents and Settings\My data\FileIn.txt" Don't miss the double quotes embracing filename.