>It works OK on the test line you provided; my guess is your datafile >has other lines that match "SMTP" in other fields of the source. Yeah when I echo'ed a single email into it everything was fine, but the file wasn't. I looked at it in vi and saw all the dos carriage returns so added a tr -d '\r' before the awk. I will check out the sed statement, thanks! jlc _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos