Thanks so much.

Have never worked with Perl before and downloaded tutorial to help me understand the syntax. Would you suggest a good book on it?

This code was awesome. The input file does consist of lots more information and the task tag has about 2 dozen attributes. (This is an embedded software file created by another integrator and has about 1000 tasks in it with multiple tags underneath). I do software code checking as code changes, this whole file was being recreated. Now all that has to be done is change the task xml file and re-imbed it. Magic..

The xml code is on an intranet machine and cannot be copied from, so the file and problem was abbreviated for convenience.

The only problem was

(m/id="(.*)"/)

actually captured the whole line including other attributes.

Each task is defined by the same version number appended to the end. I got the correct name by adding

(m/id="(.*)VERS5"/).

The last part was not captured, but it did end there. I tried the
(m/s/id="(.*)VERS5"/)

but it did not work. I got what I wanted by doing the perl then

ls *.xml > temp1
sed -e "s|.xml||g" temp1 > temp2
cat temp2 |xargs -n 1| while read TASKNAME
do
mv $TASKNAME.xml $TASKNAME'Vers5.xml'
done

This is the first time I have worked with Sun workstations and don't have this scripting thing down but with the help of this website, I have been able to do lots of neat things which have saved time.

Thanks all, this site is fantastic.

PS I am thinking about getting a MAC now that I am starting to understand UNIX. Any suggestions on what I should get?

Thanks again,

MissI