Very cool, thank you for the explaination.

I am now reading up on sed, another command you mentioned earlier, along with reading up and practicing with awk (or gawk).

Thanks for helping me out with this, and also showing me how to better use my box.

Cool

No problem. Glad I could help.

Ok, sorry but i have a "sub-question" and don't want to start a new thread. That is, what command would get rid of spaces in filenames and replace them with " - " (minus sign). I have about 3000 .mp3's some contain spaces that i would like to convert to minus or underscore signs. How would i go about doing this?
And MasterC can you point me to some quick guides on awk (gawk) and sed (or are you just reading the man pages?) Since im totally ignorant about these important programs, i just know they exist and they are important, but would like to make use of them too.
Thanks everyone!
-NSKL

Ok. . . Well, there are ways and ways of doing this. . .

awk and sed are good to read up on, but without reading about regular
expressions, they won't mean much. . .
Get an O'Reilly book on regex, sed, awk, etc. . .

Here's a very dirty, inelegant, way to do what you want:
It's dirty and inelegant because:

We first change all spaces to "_", pipe that to awk, which prints each
line twice, pipe that to sed, which converts the first "_" to "\ ", pipe that
to sed, whcih converts the second (really the first it sees) "_" to "\ ",
pipe that to grep to just pull out the lines with an _ in them, redirect the
output to a file, then source the file. This will only work for filenames
with two spaces in them. . . You'd have to find a better way to do this
that involves not caring how many spaces there are. You can do it in
awk, PERL, or whatever. . .

The above is really just an example to get you started, since it will not
work if filenames only have one space, since it would end up changing
both underscores back to spaces. . .

Ok, i'll get a book... Thank you very much!
-NSKL