Re: question about text operation using regex. The following Perl one-liner will do what you need perl -n -e 's/(.{8,8}).(.*)/$1$2/;print ;' The first set of parentheses strips out the first 8 characters, the second set  strips out everything after the 9th character which is lost. My test line was:- (echo "1212121290";echo "abcdefghijkl")|perl -n -e 's/(.{8,8}).(.*)/$1$2/;print ;' The two echo statements are in parentheses to keep them within the same  sub-shell. I'm assuming all along you are running a *nix type system. --  Andrew in Edinburgh,Scotland On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Chris Charley wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Charley"  > To:  > Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 10:45 PM > Subject: Re: question about text operation using regex. > > >>  >> ----- Original Message ----- From: ""Remy Guo""  >> Newsgroups: perl.beginners >> To: "Perl Beginners"  >> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2008 10:14 PM >> Subject: question about text operation using regex. >>  >>  >>> hi all, >>> i have a txt log file and i want to delete the 9th character of each line. >>> how can i do it using regex?...thanks! >>>  >>> -Remy >>>  >>  >> Ooops. Sent it to the poster by mistake. >>  >> You could do it from the command line >>  >> perl -pe "8 < length && substr $_,8, 1, ''" logfile.txt > altered_file.txt >>  >> Chris >>  > > Just to clarify the substr function here. Following the 1, are 2 *single*  > quotes. This assigns the empty dtring to the 9th position of the string,  > effectively eliminating the 9th character. > Chris  > > > --  To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscribe@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-help@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/