i've seen a solution for this with single line awk, but what if i want to extract the variables from the awk END section back to the shell? any ideas? thanks.

Hi: I'm not certain, but I think you're aware of command substituion. Here's an example: x=`echo ""|nawk ' { print "Hi" } END { print "Ending" } '` this if you use ksh: x=$(echo ""|nawk ' { print "Hi" } END { print "Ending" } ') Now, if you want to get just the END output into a variable without the other statement you can redirect to a file and read the file. x=$(echo ""|nawk ' { print "Hi" } END { print "Ending" > "ending.txt"} ') y=$(cat ending.txt) echo "y is $y" You can append to the ending.txt file using >>. Regards, Nails

great. i was wondering if there was syntax similar to the " -v awkvar="$shellvar" " method for inputting shell variableds, but the file output solution works perfect for what i want. thanks.