I have a command I execute: awk 'BEGIN { ORS=" " } { print "\"" $1 "\"" }' input_file which gives me exactly what I need, all field one's in quotes on one line each separated by one space. I now need to print a single quote around all of this, but the ORS flag is screwing me up, it's causing every attempt I try to repeat for every record. Anyone got a pointer how to do this? Thanks! jlc