I finally fixed the problem I was having with the shell variable in double quotes and my face is a bit red, but not too red.
It appears that the output of the cdda2wav file had a tab preceeding each song title to make it print nice and pretty. I successfully removed all the extra stuff in the line but left things in such a condition as to pass the tab or \t character along with the text string. If you echo just $variable without any double quotes, you get no tabs, just the ASCII text in the string. If you put that variable along with another variable as input to something else, they don't exactly concatenate, but appear to be separated by a single space. Putting the variable in quotes as in "$variablename$ shows the tab as it should in that particular case. I just didn't expect to find it there and echoing just the variable without quotes hid it enough to make things interesting. The script I wrote worked until I found a CD with a / in the song title's name. It, of course, choked when it tried to make bladeenc create that file because there was no directory structure there to allow that particular file name to exist. What I did was pipe the output of the line through sed as in |sed 's/\//\-/g' and that seemed to make everything good enough to use. The title with the / now has a - instead. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]