I want to match for a string that contains "/" I'm using nawk from within a bourne shell script. the nawk I'm using is: nawk '$0 ~ /'$class_name*.class'$/ {print $0}' $class_name could contain a string like: javax/activation/MimeType stdin to nawk contains strings with forward slashes. how do I construct a match in nawk where the string to match, and std, both contain "/"? here's my error message from nawk: nawk: syntax error at source line 1 context is $0 ~ >>> /javax/activation/MimeType*. <<< class$/ {print $0, jar_name} nawk: bailing out at source line 1 I'm assuming nawk doesn't like the forward slashes. Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions. Tom

There're too many things to talk about. Study it yourself carefully. #!/bin/ksh class_name="javax/activation/MimeType[0-9a-zA-Z_]*.class" echo "javax/activation/MimeTypeTEST.class" | nawk -v class_name_in="$class_name" '$0 ~ class_name_in {print $0}' Output: javax/activation/MimeTypeTEST.class Note: [:print:] and [:alnum:] don't work well on my Sun machine. So, I used [0-9a-zA-Z_]* instead. Luke Chi

wow, Luke thanks so much, that worked great! since for my script the class_name is a commandline option, it's easy to append the pattern "[0-9a-zA-Z_]*.class" to it. Thanks again for your help. Tom

You're welcome Luke Chi