m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > > Simpler, and more obvious to read: > > /sbin/ifconfig eth0 | awk '{if ( $0 ~ /inet addr:/ ) {print substr($2,6)}}' That's only obvious to the couple of people who speak awk... (Probably about the same number that use the C shell that started this problem). With more generic regexps it would be: ifconfig eth0 |sed -n -e 's/\(.*inet addr:\)\([0-9.]*\)\(.*\)/\2/p' -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com