Hi Bambi, > Wait, wait, wait. Careful there with colsep. Setting that to "" will > remove the space between columns in a report. So, Good catch! Of course, my example: >> my_status=`sqlplus -s / @$ADMIN/my.sql|cut -f 10 -d " "` ...has the implication of returning a single value. But I neglected to point that out, which certainly could lead to the "fun" results you showed. Thanks! Rich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l