Curious about the best(?) way to do some simple operations in a shell script that I would *prefer* to be POSIX-compliant, so here's the first question -- how to loop through the individual characters of a string? I just stumbled across this solution I'd never heard of: $ echo "rday" | grep -o . [-o,--only-matching option to grep] r d a y $ so, obviously, I can stick that command in a "for" loop in my script. I'm not sure I need anything simpler or more elegant than that, but is there anything even cooler? More shell questions coming shortly ... rday