On Sat, 2007-12-22 at 06:52 -0700, Karl Larsen wrote: > It is seldom I need the version of software. But when I do it > seems > that --version works all the time. The results are more than you > wanted > but who cares? > > Karl I assume he he building some automated check to verify version numbers etc, so he want to avoid having to make special cases (different parsing) for every single software he is verifying. You could create a wrapping perl script that is taking the "software" as an input parameter and then according to a config file (or a hash inside of the perl script) that will give you the answer you want. ls.command=ls --version ls.regexp=ls[^\d]+(\d+\.\d+\S+)\s* gcc.command=gcc -dumpversion gcc.regexp=^(\d+\.\d+\S+)\s* Create a hash based on this, preform a if($hash{$software}{'command'} =~ /$hash{$software}{'regexp'}/) { print $1; } If you aren't familiar with Perl programming, I can create the script for you, it is a quick task. /Peter