> Alas, that also finds lines with whitespace but no text. Then they're not really blank lines, are they? Then all you need is a (prehistoric) "sed", (like mine): its $ search /wild bls.txt "%" a b c d its $ pipe sed -e "s/ *//" < bls.txt | search /wild sys$input "%" a b c d its $ Or do I need to handle spaces _and_ tabs?