vino,

i am afraid if i understand what u suggested. Your explantion of how grep works and thereby comparing the exit status of grep to detect the presence of a letter in the string is understood, but i didnt quite follow two aspects:

1. why is there a /dev/null in his piece of code?
2. How are achieving the same without a grep in your solution?

can you please take efforts to elaborate?

Thanks a ton again,
Sirisha