Thanks all for the advice.  That part of the script is working, but  
I'm a bit concerned because I don't think I could debug it if  
something goes wrong.  But what could go wrong?

Well, now that I have the list of numbers I need to use them to  
extract lines from various files that are in pipe delimited  
format.Each number is unique and only appears in one line of the file.


The problem is when I run either of the scripts below the result is  
every single line of the file.


set thePattern to "\\|4571100\\||12245332\\||7519636\\||4824164\\||2971399\\||925639\\|| 
"
set myShellScript to "egrep " & quoted form of thePattern & " " &  
quoted form of programFile
set myOutput to do shell script myShellScript

set thePattern to "\\|4571100\\||"
set myShellScript to "egrep " & quoted form of thePattern & " " &  
quoted form of programFile
set myOutput to do shell script myShellScript

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

ES