>The bottom line is that I did not notice that "nawk" was available >for "calcavg" ... have been trying to do "calcavg" with just awk and >had been completely unsucessful at detecting / picking up the "-c" >and "n" values ... is there some way to do it with just sh and awk? Yes, you can do it with sh and awk. You can use nawk if you want, but you can pick up the command line arguments with sh and then use awk to calculate the average. You may need to use different calls to awk to do -c vs no -c. You may also want to use a trick like in "shwc" from the lecture notes to deal with the files. Jim Plank