Suggestion: rather than use egrep (which, as Chas points out, requires a new process - and ignoring his solution for a moment - sorry), it might make more sense (and increase portability) to move the RegEx parsing into Perl.
my $var = grep {/This|That/}, `cmd --arg1 --arg2; (Did I do this right? I'm not very familiar with grep) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/