thanks for the tut phaza, amazing that someone did not have it here already. look forward to other updates on this topic.

awk has helped me out a bunch in the past, and is certainly a viable tool for any *nix user-owner-sa, etc, and it is very flexible in usage.

if you like spending $$$, i would also recommend the O'Reilly book on sed/awk. great reading.

just for grins, I took a quick look to add to this and found a few more sources:

http://www.vectorsite.net/tsawk.html

http://stud.wsi.edu.pl/~robert/awk/

thanks again phaza!