Hi Folks, A rather general question on scripting. I'm taking a file and using awk, removing the first column from it which consists of lines like this: 208A03860010237500300767698/00125.04.20050521770084998030132879550012 I then want to remove the 2nd and 3rd characters and dump them to a separate file (each extraction on a separate line) at which point uniq -c will be run on the file and the results emailed out. The question is does anyone have any idea on removing the 2nd and 3rd characters, I suspect I can use some kind of regular expression and piping the file through sed to expand everything out and then use awk again to remove the desired parts. However what I know of regex can be written in very large type on the back of a postage stamp. Any suggestions or different approaches gratefully received. Regards, Ben