On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Darren Freeman wrote: > The following line entered at a shell will print my UID: > > gawk -F ':' '/dfreeman:*/ {print $3}' </etc/passwd Or % id -u dfreeman The original would match fredfreeman too. So that form probably should be: % gawk -F ':' -v uname=$UNAME '$1 == uname {print $3}' </etc/passwd -- Brett