What was I thinking? Brain was in loop mode. cut -f1 -d: < emplis.txt On 1/28/09, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I think what you may be missing is that awk is a processing language that > is designed to handle whatever it gets from STDIN. > > There's no need really to use it in a loop as you have done. > > Mark has already shown how to do use awk. > > Another tool you may be interested in is cut. > > while read emp > do > echo $emp | cut -f1 -d: > done < emplis.txt > > john_ray > joe_smith > bill_bates > jane_de > > > For some humorous surfing, google for 'useless use of cat'. :) > > Jared > -- Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l