Forgot my closing square bracket in that last posting. Re-posting for archive purposes in case someone with less bash experience stumbles across this later and tries it (and for those of us who copy/paste to save typing...). if [ "$name" !> "${name%%+(;|:)*}" ] then echo "Invalid character!" fi Jacques B. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list