hi, i need to search for a pattern in files for example the content of the file is below 3555005!K!00630000078!C!20090805235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!K!204042880166840!I!20090805235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!D!16042296!DUMMY!20090805235959!0!47001231000000!0!336344324!1!1!POST!USAGE!336344324!0!3555005!C!336344324!1!!!EUR!1!1!!I!3555005!S!00630000078!20090805172515!LF010300! here i want to search for lines with !D! and the 7th field in the line is less than the system date, then i want to delet the line and save the file. is that possible? please help. thanks, Vijay

If ! is your field separator, then the 7th field is 16042296. How do you get a date out of that? The 5th field is a date "20090805235959" and 60th field is a date "20090805172515". A !D! would appear to be the 32d field. This question requires much more information. However, modifying your input file using today's date (20 Sep 2009) I created 3 entries: 3555005!K!00630000078!C!20090805235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!K!204042880166840!I!20090805235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!D!16042296!DUMMY!20090805235959!0!47001231000000!0!336344324!1!1!POST!USAGE!336344324!0!3555005!C!336344324!1!!!EUR!1!1!!I!3555005!S!00630000078!20090805172515!LF010300! 3555005!K!00630000078!C!20090920235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!K!204042880166840!I!20090805235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!X!16042296!DUMMY!20090805235959!0!47001231000000!0!336344324!1!1!POST!USAGE!336344324!0!3555005!C!336344324!1!!!EUR!1!1!!I!3555005!S!00630000078!20090805172515!LF010300! 3555005!K!00630000078!C!20090920235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!K!204042880166840!I!20090805235959!47001231000000!16042296!336344324!A!1!ENG!0!00630000078!NO!00630000078!3555005!D!16042296!DUMMY!20090805235959!0!47001231000000!0!336344324!1!1!POST!USAGE!336344324!0!3555005!C!336344324!1!!!EUR!1!1!!I!3555005!S!00630000078!20090805172515!LF010300! I then wrote this rough script: #!/bin/ksh function processLine { print $line | while IFS='!' read f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f6 f7 theRest do if [[ $f5 -lt $Today ]] then WriteIt=1 else WriteIt=0 fi done } typeset -L8 f5 Today=$(date +%Y%m%d) exec 3< junk099.txt while read -u3 line do if [[ $line == *"!D!"* ]] then processLine else WriteIt=1 fi if [[ $WriteIt -eq 0 ]] then print $line fi done Running this script against the modified input file on 20 Sep 2009, it output the line that contained no !D! and the line that had a !D! but an equal date. I'll let you figure out the rest.