Hi, On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:48, Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote: > I am trying to create a script that takes an entire file, > drops the first 19 characters from each line and creates a new file. > newline=`echo $LINE | cut -f 19-` What you want is "cut -c 19-" (-c as in characters) and not "cut -f 19-" (-f as in fields). > echo $newline >> output.txt This will also remove the spacing. You should at least use echo "$newline" >>output.txt, but in any case it's silly as you can just: cut -c 19- <test.txt >output.txt HTH, Filipe