I apologize for using a brain dead example. I was more excited about the prospect of hitting all files under the current directory recursively, not the actual processing I used in my examples. Thanks for the pointer to xargs. I didn't know about that one, I'll have to take a closer look at it's man page. On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 13:05:32 +0900, Pat Maddox wrote: > Or you can use the tools designed for finding stuff :) > > find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep Hello > > That version will work for all files. You can play with find to match > any file you want. > > Pat