2011/7/20 Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>: > On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 03:23:58 PM Sean Carolan wrote: > [snip] >> Where did all the letter n's go? > > I can't duplicate the problem here on a CentOS 5.6 box. What locale are you set to? Here's what I get (note that a copy from the e-mail you sent embedded newlines, which had to be stripped out (one of the many things xargs makes trivially easy) to get the result....): Here's a simpler example, with a single line in the file: [scarolan at server:~]$ cat loremipsum.txt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. n n n n n lots of letter n! [scarolan at server:~]$ myvar=$(grep Lorem loremipsum.txt) [scarolan at server:~]$ echo $myvar Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, co sectetur adipisci g elit. lots of letter ! Weird huh?