That's pretty good. However, you are possibly altering the field separator (replacing spaces with tabs) and certainly loosing any fields greater than 3. This version changes field 2 and only field 2. cat /etc/hosts | awk '{$2=tolower($2); print}' -- .!# RichardBronosky #!. On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Al Snow<jasnow at hotmail.com> wrote: > cat /etc/hosts | awk '{ print $1, tolower($2), $3 }'