Hi Patrick, On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 21:34:46 -0500 UTC (12/5/2004, 8:34 PM -0500 UTC my time), Patrick Shanahan in part wrote: P> Thankyou, I am using 'perl -p -i -e 's/2002:/2004:/g' *.* P> with all the pertinent files (about 20 at a time) in a temp dir so I P> can check that the photos are not screwed. Since I am working on P> copies, I see no reason for generating .bak files. Good deal, glad I could help.. I put the .bak part in there so if anyone wants to change only certain files and not all files in a dir, e.g. change only patrick.jpg files to gary.jpg files, and leave other files in the dir alone, it would only write a .bak for the original patrick.jpg files as patrick.jpg.bak and leave the other files alone in the dir, and not rewrite them... This also makes it easy to restore them by removing the .bak to their original state. nothin' like a good old perl pie <g> -- Gary