Thom Hickey wrote about the "linefeed trick". That was a bit of a "duh" moment for me. But then, I've seldom had the need to grep a marc format file. He also mentioned wc -l working better with that. I've gotten around that with a short Perl program: go to http://homepages.wmich.edu/~zimmer/marc_index.html and look for marccount.pl. It doesn't require any modifications to the marc file, but I suspect that others have written something like that, too. Roy Zimmer----->OIT----->Library Stuff & Other things-----> Western Michigan University----->Kalamazoo, Michigan USA localsystem=P3 ICBM=(%Fatal:GPS error 51) RF=KB8UBA AF="Hey you!" QRM! [log in to unmask] you go, there you are!