> (No, I don't advocate perl for everything, but knowing more about the > problem can > help in determining a suitable solution.) You're right, I gave up and used python instead. The basic idea here was to gather together a long list of hostnames by grepping through a few hundred files, check the list for duplicates, and alert someone if duplicates were found. I had a nifty one-liner using grep, sort, and uniq -c that basically spat out a list of hosts with duplicate entries, but in the end it was easier to manipulate the data (at least for me) using python. thanks Sean