Quoth Tomasz Zielonka : | On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 11:31:36PM +0100, Jim Burton wrote: | > I think that would only work if there was one column per line...I didn't | > make it clear that as well as being comma separated, the delimiter is | > around each column, of which there are several on a line so if the | > delimiter is ~ a file might look like: | > | > ~sdlkfj~, ~dsdkjf~ #eo row1 | > ~sdf | > dfkj~, ~dfsd~ #eo row 2 | | It would be easier to experiment if you could provide us with an | example input file. If you are worried about revealing sensitive | information, you can change all characters other then newline, | ~ and , to "A"s, for example. An accompanying output file, for checking | correctness, would be even nicer. Yes, especially if there's anyone else as little acquainted with CSV files as I am! I have never bothered to learn to work with multiple lines in sed, but from what I gather so far, the following awk would do it -- awk '{ if (/~$/) print; else printf "%s", $0 }' (literal separator for legibility.) I know we're not exactly looking for an awk or sed solution here, but thought it might add some context to the exercise anyway. Donn Cave, donn@drizzle.com