Hi Is there anyway of doing a "cat" of the start & end of a file & append it to another eg: __Start file______ 00:00 this is the start........ . . . 04:00 this is the end.. ---end of file------------- I need to put the start & end times of a log file to another file Any help will be appreciated thanks Hamim

head -1 > newfile tail -1 >> newfile man head man tail

Hi Thanks For your Help, I managed to get the out of the file but cannot get the home directory inside the contents of my file called HOME. any ideas?? LOG=`find . -name day0*.log -mtime +1 \ ` STARTFILE=`head -6 $LOG >/tmp/HOME` ENDFILE=`tail -l |grep Logfile $LOG>>/tmp/HOME` for dir in $HOME;do echo $HOME;done it only echo the home directory to screen?

Would you post a sample of your data file? Where is $HOME being created?

My Previuos script does not give me the latest file created ie day*.log I tried this ,but it cannot find the first variable as it has to do a find inside the home directories. I am starting my script from /home; Here is my script: #!/bin/ksh LOG=`ls -lt day*.log|grep "^-" |head -1 |awk '{print $NF}'` STARTFILE=`head -6 $LOG >/tmp/HOME` ENDFILE=`tail -l |grep Logfile $LOG>>/tmp/HOME` for f in $(find /home/sing* -type f -name $LOG);do cd $(dirname $f);$STARTFILE;$ENDFILE;cd - done I get an error cannot find day*.log- How can I get my script to ignore $LOG & then use it again after the find. Thanks David