Hi all, Thanks so much for your help....I ended up working on other stuff and saving this for next week..So I will try the script that you suggested and hopefully this will work.Otherwise I will have to change the names individually...and doing that for 1000+ files is definitely a pain in the rear :S. Btw, I will need to write more scripts in the future..I will probably have to look into perl or other scripting languages later on but for now I just need to polish up my shell scripting. I am actually looking for a good book for this. Any suggestions? I heard O'Reilly books are really good. Incognito_kanchi, Those files are actually generated from a program called sequencher, used in DNA sequencing. Thats as far as I know coz I am also relatively new to this area. Danger, I think this should work: cat n1 | wc where n1 is the name of the program (file). This gives the number of characters, words and lines in the file. Hope this helps.