On Aug 3, 2007, at 2:34 PM, David Livesay wrote: > I understand that, but how do you get cat to put quotes around each > line? Sorry, Dave, I was just trying to show the interaction of the shell and the echo command. (Also, I didn't have time earlier to drag the book out.) Here is one paradigm for reading lines from a file. (Courtesy of page 174 of "Learning the bash Shell", second edition.) (There are several others shown before this one, along with a suggestion not to do it this way for "large" files [over a few hundred lines, which probably applies to your logs] for performance reasons. But since you're doing a one-time task, you really don't care about performance: "you paid for those cycles, you might as well use them".) The script: $cat reader.sh #!/bin/bash { while read line; do echo "$line" done } < test.txt The test file: $cat test.txt one two three four five six seven eight nine Running the script (I did make it executable) $./reader.sh one two three four five six seven eight nine If I remove the quotes around $line in the echo "$line" command, the result becomes what you don't want: $./reader.sh one two three four five six seven eight nine The script creates a nameless function ("block" in C terms), then executes the function redirecting standard input to come from the file. Note the complete lack of cat. --John