relatively new to this. Hope someone can help me. I need to read from a file. 11 columns, each column is separated by a space. contains numercial values only. each rows can have integer of value 1-5 & a "-" . So what I did was to use a while loop basically something like this while read a b c d e f g h i j k do x=`expr $b $c... $k` dont <input file #a can be ignore at the moment. for it is something like identification but however becoz of the "-" in the rows, i need to replace each "-" with a 0. but not sure how to do so. i know it is something like ${var:0} but i am not sure how to implement into the script... plus after so I need to count the number of rows which doesnt contain "-".. Really hope someone can help me out here.

How about #!/bin/ksh integer a b c d e f g h i j k sed 's/-/0/g' xx.dat | while read a b c d e f g h i j k do print $a $b $c $d $e $f $g $h $i $j $k done

Thank you. it works. now just need to know how to count the "-".. thanks so much

if let's say i have this 1234567 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 7 8 - and many other simlar lines.. i need to count the number of int from the second columns onwards. How do i tell the system to like check for every "-", and do a subtraction from 10. coz 10 is the total number of columns beside the one column. anyone has a gd idea????