On 12/29/11 8:50 PM, Brian Hechinger wrote: On Dec 29, 2011, at 16:52, "H Vlems"<hvlems at zonnet.nl> wrote: .eqs. compares two strings for an exact match. It is case sensitive and thus surprisingly strict for an OS that seems to do uppercase only... Good to know. Being a unix guy I probably would have assumed case sensitivity. :) What is regex?? Regular Expressions. A pain in the ass to learn but totally worth it. Circuit names for ethernet device are DDD-N DDCMP (serial lines), CI and DSSI devices are DD-N-M Where D is a letter and N and M are digits. Ok, so I see a trend here. All circuit names have a dash in them. That's how I was going to filter them out but I think I found a better way. Thanks!! -brian With the common dash, check out the f$element( ) function in DCL. Very handy. Apologies if someone already mentioned it. I jsut scanned through about 100 HECnet messages and I'm blurry. John H. Reinhardt