Ok First, This is what I am ultimatly trying to do.... Create a batch file that will.. 1- take a computername and resolve the ip on the domain using NSlookup. 2-take that ip and extract the first 3 octs into a variable.(example: out of 192.168.1.50, I just want [192.168.1.] as the variable. 3- starting from 2 attempt to quickly ping the ip to see if it is being used (example:[192.168.1.] 2 ) 4- if 2 is not online goto next number (3) and so forth until it finds a PC online. 5- when a pc is found run the following command to see if anyone is logged in. ---------------------- wmic /node:%cp% PROCESS where "caption='explorer.exe'" getowner | find "User = " -------------------------- 6-Using the above command, somehow determine in command prompt if user is logged in or not. 7- if somone IS logged in, procced to ping the next PC (4) and so forth until find another one that is on and that nooone is logged into. 8-put the ip address of the avalible PC that noone is logged onto into a variable %sevrer% ========================= So right now So far i can use the wmic command piped with FInd to display the user name if someone IS logged in. But I can't figure out how to strip the output to just the user name. This is the output I usually get: ------------------------------------------ User = "27berry"; User = "27berry"; ------------------------------------------ Notice the duplicate. and the wasted space and the "User = " part. i just cant seem to figure out how to strip it down. any thoughts? sorry if its kind of confusing.. Thanks if you guys have any ideas.

wmic /node:%cp% PROCESS where "caption='explorer.exe'" getowner | find "User = " > out.txt for /F "tokens=2 delims==" %%j in (out.txt) do set _user=%%j del out.txt set _user=%_user:"=% set _user=%_user:~1,-1%