Ensel Sharon wrote: > and I know how to use awk to strip away the leading "md" from each piece > of the output ... but I do not know how to take output like: > > 8 9 11 14 > > and decide that the lowest available number is "0". How can I do this ? % echo '9 8 11 14' | sort -nt ' ' | head -1 8 -- -Chuck