As promised in my last mail wanting help, I've been reading up on perl nd having a go and playing with a script sent to me by Raphael (Many thx) ....

Now my problem is, for some reason, in my virtual user table, there are space and tab's, how do I get the split to recognise the tab as well as the space char?

my @fields = split(" ", $_); # Break it down, this is the original and sees the space ok...

my @fields = split(" ", $_) || split("<ascii for tab?", $_); # Break it down, is this anywhere close ?

What I'm aiming for is a script that I can add/modify or delete entries in the virtual usertable.....

I can get the entries added without any problems, but I will probably be posting again at some time to get help on modifying and deleteing them...

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

# make sure we get command line args

if (not(defined($ARGV[0]))) { print "\n\n\nUsage: chk_alias <username>\n\n\n"; exit(1); }

my $username = $ARGV[0]; # Get the username from commandline chomp($username);

open(VUT, "</etc/mail/virtusertable")|| die "Cannot read virtusertable\n"; while (<VUT>) { # Read a line from /etc/mail/virtusertable my @fields = split(" ", $_); # Break it down my $alias = $fields[0]; my $user = $fields[1]; # User name chomp($user); next unless $user eq $username; print "Alias for $username is $alias\n"; } close VUT;