On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 8:14 PM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I'm thinking there's a way to run tr on a file, have the result > in memory, then egrep that to get the desired results, but I'm not there > yet. That'd be a "pipe". And tr and egrep run in parallel, so there's no delay and no need for a big memory buffer. tr writes a line of output, egrep reads a line of input, repeat. do shell script "tr '\\r' '\\n' " & quoted form of pathName & " | egrep " & quoted form of regExp Note that you just don't supply a filename to egrep at all; it automatically reads from its standard input in that case, which the shell has attached to the pipe. -- Mark J. Reed <[log in to unmask]>