Many thanks- Most people pointed out that I was using single quotes around my sed command which was preventing the shell from expanding the variables inside which was true for the incantation I put in the question. I ended up using a different solution recommended by arno uhlmelmahei" <arno@panix.com> sed -n 1,33p file >newfile cat datafile >>newfile sed -n '43,$p' file >>newfile I placed this into a for loop and got the result I was looking for. Many thanks to the following for their suggestions: JULIAN, JOHN C (AIT)" <jj2195@sbc.com francisco" <frisco@blackant.net Kurt Schulte" <r2kurts@yahoo.com> Ray Brownrigg" <ray@mcs.vuw.ac.nz Eric Noriega" <noriega@gwu.edu John Leadeham" <jl@lammtarra.fslife.co.uk Also, thanks to John Leadeham for steering me towards the usenet group news:comp.unix.shell for similar questions. Craig Russell _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Thu Jan 27 16:18:53 2005
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