Hi, On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 16:20, Joseph L. Casale<JCasale at activenetwerx.com> wrote: > '/string/a \\tstuff\t\t\tmorestuff' != "/string/a \\tstuff\t\t\tmorestuff" Yes, indeed... The rules of quoting and backslashes in the shell are not very uniform and can get quite tricky... Also, the \t is interpreted by sed, and AFAIK it is available in GNU sed only, so the syntax you are using above might not be very portable to other versions of "sed". If your script gets this tricky it's probably time to move to Perl, which can also do that easily in an one-liner and, in this case, might actually be more portable. (Heck, it might even be more readable!) HTH, Filipe