Can you show a small sample of your data, one line that works correctly, and one or more that don't work correctly? -Mark ________________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of A Joshi [ajoshi977@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 7:25 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: ** OT : awk works only for first line Hi, I am trying awk to get the first word from each line in a file : I am doing : BEGIN { FS=":" } {print $1} For the first line : it prints the first work. For other lines it prints other words also. I tried to put in FS as space but that did not help. Can someone help? I did try google but could only find example like above. Thanks for help. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l