Thus spake David selby: > I need to get the first two file names from a directory ... > My code > > directory=$(ls -r --format=single-column) > > works perfect and gives me ... > > 20030617Jun17.tar.gz 20030616Jun16.tar.gz 20030615Jun15.tar.gz > 20030301Mar01.tar.gz 20030222Feb22.tar.gz 20030215Feb15.tar.gz > 20030208Feb08.tar.gz 20030205Feb05.tar.gz > > I want to cut the first two file names from the list ... To my way of > thinking this should be easy ... > > cut -d' ' -f2 $directory The problem is that when you do that, cut is interpreting the contents of $directory to be a list of files to operate on. This means that cut will actually *perform the cut* on say, the contents of 20030205Feb05.tar.gz files=$(/bin/ls -1 | tail -2) Will leave $files containing the last 2 filenames. It's probably best to use it in some sort of loop, for file in $(/bin/ls -1 | tail -2); do # do something with each file here done -- Nathan Poznick <poznick@conwaycorp.net> "This is wild! I've never killed a guy like *this* before. Neat!" -Joel (as Hercules). #410
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