<snip> > > People love to use very long pipelines. How about... > > ifconfig eth0 | awk -F. '/inet addr:/ {print $3}' Or if the NIC is not necessarily eth0, but it's still the first one, then the below will still work and will exclude any subsequent NICs (you beat me to it, I was just testing things out before posting...). ifconfig | awk -F . 'NR==1, /inet addr/ {printf $3}' Jacques B.