I have a large database and I am trying to pull certain portions of a field out of it and display that in its own file. Basically I have a field that contains e-mail received line headers. I want to take that field and pull only the IP address contained in that received line out and display it in another file. I have been told that sed and grep are what I should be looking at rather than awk, the problem is that I have very limited knowledge of Unix. the field that i am trying to extract the IP addresses from is in the 3rd column under the name "value." If anyone can tell me what i should be looking at in Unix books to figure out how to accomplish this or help me out in any way i would really appreciate it.

For starters you're going to have to give more details - like what database you're using. Once the database is known somebody should be able to help you execute a select: select value from table_name Then you have to tell us if the IP address is in value or if we have to parse value for the address.

cut -d " " -f3 $DB_OUTPUT_FILE -d " " specifies that the delimiter of columns is one space -f3 means that I want the third column You don't have to dump the data from the DB. Are you using Oracle ? Using substr and instr Oracle functions in Oracle SQL, you'll be able to get IP directly from your table. Luke Chi