--On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 02:53:06 PM -0500 Sean Carolan <scarolan at gmail.com> wrote: > Now the next > question would be, how can I include the \n characters in my variable > string, without fudging with $IFS? Can you describe, functionally and a bit higher level, what you're trying to achieve? Is myvar supposed to contain the entire file content if the file contains "lorem", or just any lines containing lorem complete with newline, or are you expecting some other form of delimiter, or what? Also of interest is what you're going to do with myvar after the fact (write it out, do a replacement, whatever). For example, if you're trying to do some form of processing that only considers lines containing lorem, other tools might give a cleaner, faster, and more maintainable result: #! /usr/bin/perl use taint; use strict; while (<>) { if (m,lorem,) { # do something with $_ } } (No, I don't advocate perl for everything, but knowing more about the problem can help in determining a suitable solution.) Devin