I started my present job in March of 1990 and was told on the day I was hired that I was to learn C as in the C programming language, and Unix. There is no end to what there is to learn so you'll never catch up. I have done an average job of trying to learn about C and Unix but I was once in much the same spot as Karen finds herself. The difference is that it is much easier to find accessible information today than it was in 1990, actually 1989 when I was working here part-time. Even with the graphical interface, Unix is still a lot more cerebral than Windows since it is an operating system based on commands, numbers and words that happens to have a graphical interface added to it. Note, I've been saying Unix and not Linux and that is on purpose. Linux is but one flavor of Unix and I can remember being thrilled in about the year 2000 when I first got Linux going on a Dell Pentium that had previously run Windows95. I was afraid that Linux would be sort of a toy version of DOS but nothing could be further from the truth. Now for some specific advice on two unrelated things: Since you come from a DOS world, you are always the root user. In Unix this is called the superuser and you can pick any color cape you want to ware but it should be flashy and glow in the dark or something. You can add, delete and mess up anything on your system you desire as superuser. There is a much safer route to travel, however, and that is to be yourself as much as possible. You can still wreck your home directory all you want, but you aren't as likely to trash the operating system or to have to start all over or even reboot if you log in as you and then only become superuser when you must. That's thing number 1. The second thing since you mentioned perl regular expressions is to tell you that the keys to the Unix kingdom belong to the expert on regular expressions. Even after 23 years of this, I still keep learning about regular expressions because they are so, so useful. Don't let the perl part confuse you. Perl is a programming language that was put together by real brains in the field. It uses regular expressions but so do a huge number of other Unix applications that have nothing to do with perl. Regular expressions are lists of symbols such as [0-9a-f] and tons of other blobs of what might look at first like somebody's cat walked on the keyboard, but these blocks of what look like garbage are rules that determine whether or not text should be ignored, printed or modified. There is an older text editor called ed and if you do a man command on ed as in man ed on some systems, you will see a big discussion on the use of regular expressions. Also, you can use google to find countless articles on regular expressions and their use. You will amaze yourself eventually on how useful these things are. Well, enough rambling. I hope this helps. Just focus on one task at a time and don't try to eat the elephant in one sitting. It causes heart burn and most people can't eat that much elephant at once. Martin _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list