Nelson Flores schrieb: > You cannot ...i least I think you can't ... you see, sed parses each > line independently once and only once, looking for certain patterns > .. this is what makes it so fast... so I believe that "the last line" > is an unknown entity to sed pattern recognizer (pun intended) You can give line addresses in sed like in ed or vi. Something like sed -e '$! s/.*/\'&/g' should work, though the op might have to experiment with escaping the single quote he wants to add. Putting the expresion into a sed script file worked for me. The $ address operator finds the last line the ! negates this address, so sed will parse all the lines but the last. Regards, uwe ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------