On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tony Molloy <tony.molloy at ul.ie> wrote: >>> >> ]$ cat testcentoslist | egrep ^m.*:.*:.*:850: >> m9718308:pw:9301:850: Lynch :/home/pgstud/m9718508:/bin/bash >> > > Exactly what I needed. I'll just drop the cat as a later poster > pointed out. > sed -n -e '/pattern/p' can match anything grep would do and might be even more useful if you want substitutions for subsequent use. And of course perl can do anything sed can do, and then some... -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com