On Wednesday 10 March 2004 09:29, Craig Schneider wrote: <snip> > Just battling to use awk to extract the last for collumns. > > -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root [ 234 Mar 10 06:38 backup ] > > Any help would be greatly appreciated. Shell scripting is definitely > not one of my strong points. http://tldp.org/guides.html Look for "Advanced Bash Shell Scripting guide" - it'll cover all you need. Especially for awk, http://sparky.rice.edu/~hartigan/awk.html is also interesting. -A