Browsing the list I saw a question regarding using grep and friends to get an IP. I do this, but to allow a single firewall config file to be used on a number of machines without editing. Here are the first few lines, I hope they are useful to someone. I extract the IP and the broadcast (I don't always have 8 bit subnetting). # define internal and external interfaces int_i=eth0 ext_i=eth1 loopback=lo # define the IP of the external address, only IP used AdrsLine=$(ifconfig ${ext_i} | grep "inet addr:") ext_ip=$(expr "$AdrsLine" : ".*inet addr: *\([0-9.]*\)") Bcast=$(expr "$AdrsLine" : ".*Bcast: *\([0-9.]*\)") -- bill davidsen (davidsen@xxxxxxx) Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979.