On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 23:26 +0200, Marko Vojinovic wrote: > # arping -f -I eth0 $ipnumber | grep Unicast > Unicast reply from 10.0.0.3 [00:0C:29:C8:DE:E2] 1.040ms > > but I am over my head in extracting just the number. I guess awk is the > tool, but the man page is not very illustrative and I do not have > time/patience to learn to program in 'awk language' in order to do > this thing. And C would probably be an overkill... :-) I'm sure you got a bazillion answers to this alreadybut just for fun this is one way to do it (though up in less than 30 seconds) - # arping -f -I eth0 $ipnumber | grep Unicast | awk '{print $5}' | tr -d /\[\]/ No, it's not the best way to do it, but I like sticking awk in anywhere I can regardless of necessity. :-) -- Boring Home Page - http://www.webtrek.com/joe See my blog, sumo game ranks and other interesting junk