if I have a file that has more than these two entries bats at tt net-bats at tt and I do a "grep -v bats" (intention was to get everything except bats but net-bats was mistakenly grepped) How do I specify the beginning of the line and match after that so bats is caught not net-bats? THanks for any suggestions. Jerry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20060830/80f37929/attachment-0004.html>