Hmm quite difficult for me to express my problem in one sentence.Introduction [which is recomended to be skipped] {i am a newbee to csh perl, awk and stuff, and by surfing these forums i managed to build quite a big code using all three of them in a script. Have to admitt, it was not a good idea, and its the perfect example of how not to program, but i have to little time to learn a complete script language like perl. And i needed some stuff, which i wasnt sure if perl could do it, or at least i didnt find how } #end of time wasitng intro in a csh script i have the following two lines:set t1g = `perl -e "printf '%07g', $t1-$dt1"`perl -pi -e "s/%%var1%/$t1g/" main_opt.kfirst one is meant to calculate a value of a csh variable which consists of floating points numbers read from a specific line and column text file elswhere in the code. i call perl since it can do the floating point opperations.second line is meant to substitute the value of %%var1% in a text file with the number calculated in the first line. like:R T2 %%var1% R T3 %%var2% R T4 3.260000R R T6 3.660000R T7 3.860000R T8 4.060000R Now the problem, i would like perl to preplace it with a floating point number of formatted length 7 in my case. now the number has different lengths some times its 0.125 and some times its 0.3333333 or 923.24 how can i get it to a fixed length? (0.12500 0.33333 923.24) such that the other values in the text file dont move.Hope some one can help. Thank you verry much.Radamez