Hey Ben!   
      
    BR> Oops, that was it   
      
   Excellent.  A neat trick is to count opening and closing brackets and   
   they should always be equal.  For every '(' there should be a ')'.   
   Same can be said for '[' and ']', as well as '{' and '}'.  Qoutes are   
   the same as brackets whether they be single, double or backticks.   
   Always in pairs.  Very binary mathematically speaking.  Go figure eh?   
      
    BR> yes, let's finish it.   
      
   I just ran across one more issue we should check before proceeding.   
   What does this yeild?;   
      
     echo "1:393/68.0" | sed 's/[:/.]/ /g'   
      
   If it works at all at your end you should see "1 393 68 0" (<- without   
   the quotes).  If not then either you will need to nab sed for cygwin   
   or we'll need to come up with a replacement call to split the FTN   
   addresses to it's component parts in order to farm them out to perl to   
   pack into 16 bit binary integers for both the PKT and MSG header(s).   
   However this works just as well and doesn't require sed;   
      
     echo "1:393/68.0" | tr ":/." " "   
      
   We already know you have coreutils and perhaps the above is a more   
   minimalistic approach.  Without thinking about it too much the 'tr'   
   method appeals to me but having 'sed' handy is a good idea.   
      
   What do you think?  Personally I vote for 'tr' in this case but opting   
   for 'sed' won't hurt my feeling any.   
      
   Life is good,   
   Maurice   
      
   --- GNU bash, version 4.2.10(2)-release (x86_64-atom-linux-gnu)   
    * Origin: Pointy Stick Society (1:261/38.9)