Many Thanks for your reply, I found out about "tr" and translated the file tabs to ":" and once my edits were completed, used "tr" to put them back. Its Solaris 9 and sed doesnt like \t, but tr...
I used %H%M for hours and minutes within a date variable, to latch the date/time onto the end of a file, the script it was in is now under SCCS control and the %H% is a predefined parameter for SCCS,...