Thanks to everyone who responded. Neat scripts to play with. Oh, and FYI, I figured out I'm using an offset of 507...and the file is about 32000 lines. Thank god for parsing! Maybe I'll cast these ideas into Ruby. I'm trying to learn that language and I really love it. Matt -- I am a theoretical chemist. Fear me! The Matt -- http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~thompsma/