Well, I finally picked up a sed/awk book and now I don't have to post to the list on how to do the basic stuff... -- so now I've got a more legit question with grouping. It seems not to be working for me.. the book I have says that using () only works with (usually) egrep and awk. I'm not getting error messages, but, it isn't working either. I want to search for an ip address by using the string: [0-9]\{3\}(\.[0-9]\{1,3\})\{3\} (3 numbers, then 3 sets of a dot followed by 1 to 3 numbers). If I run: echo "asdfas .asd 216.123.34.123 asdfas asdf"|sed 's/.*\([0-9]\{3\}(\.[0-9]\{1,3\})\{3\}\).*$/\1/' I just get the original line back. If I search just with the basic string, it doesn't match: echo "asdfas .asd 216.123.34.123 asdfas asdf"|sed -n '/([0-9]\{3\}(\.[0-9]\{1,3\})\{3\}/p outputs nothing. I think the problem is with the grouping of the the runs of .### since: echo "asdfas .asd 216.23.123.43 asdf asd|sed 's/.*\([0-9]\{3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\).*$/\1/' works prefectly, but is a little long in syntax. Thanks, Ben --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org