I would like to extract specific information from lines in log files and perform math functions on them. Grep is ok for getting the lines I want and putting them where I want them. But I've reached a limit in what I can do because I lack the education. Two things I need to learn: 1 - How I can search for subnet matches in /var/log/messages, like I can in Ethereal. 2 - How I can extract $omefield (columns?) and print $ame to $omefile after doin $ummath on $omefield. I've been looking at man pages and am thinking awk sort uniq ... am I looking in the right direction? Are there any cautionary comments with shell tools as powerful as awk? What are '.po' files? Thanks, farmer6re9 -- Eating Crow is better with MyCrowSauce -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml