I'm not sure whether this is a bug or not. On Redhat Enterprise Linux, the cut command will accept the following " cut -c0-5 " (Cut ver 5.97) On Fedora it will not accept the 0, it must be " cut -c1-5 " (cut ver 8.5) Although both are functionally the same, they seem to only return 5 characters The script it was written in worked without problems from Redhat 7.2 to present RHEL I only noticed the problem with fedora 13 and 14. I was able to copy the cut command from RHEL to Fedora 14 and it works fine. What am losing between these two versions? Was there a divergence somewhere along the way where cut stopped tolerating the the 0 base index? Thanks George Gallen Senior Programmer/Analyst Accounting/Data Division, EDI Administrator ggallen@wyanokegroup.com ph:856.848.9005 Ext 220 The Wyanoke Group http://www.wyanokegroup.com