Jim,

Excellent, that worked!

I see that I will have to take some time to decipher all of the parameters for printf in the man pages!

That being said, maybe you can help me know with the later half of the "if" statement.

if [ $MNTH!=01 ]
then
(( MNTH=$MNTH-01 ))
MNTH=$(printf "%02d" $MNTH)
YEAR=$YEAR
else
if [ $MNTH=01 ]
then
MNTH=12
(( YEAR=$YEAR-1 ))

in red now prints out as such 00/2009


again that is very cool about the printf, thanks for you help.