i have to write a bourne program to perform a search of an employee list searching a specific column **only and outputing a different column of the same line..this is driving me absoluting crazy..any help would appreciated!!! Columns Information 01 - 11 Department 12 - 27 Player name 28 - 43 Target 44- 56 Team Name Example of the " emplist " file... (The first two lines represent columns numbers, not in file) EngineeringJohn Smith avinder Singh Rockets Operations Karen Smythe John Smith Eagles ... etc… Sample execution: $ as3 Player name? ohn See target (T/t) or team name (M/m)? m John Smith Rockets Dean Johnson Eagles Raj Johns Eagles

Hi: The easiest was of parsing column type data is use the cut command: Regards, Nails #!/bin/sh while read line do dept=`echo $line|cut -c1-11` echo $dept pname=`echo $line|cut -c12-27` echo $pname target=`echo $line|cut -c44-56` echo $target tname=`echo $line|cut -c57-70` echo $tname done cdata.file # need a less than error sign between done and data.file