I think the easist way is to use awk. you can even do it from within R by "system" (I think). With awk "BEGIN{FS=\"\t\";OFS=\"\t\"} {print \$3, \$8}" datafile > tmp_datafile you extract columns 3 and 84 from a tab-separated file "datafile" and write to "tmp_datafile". If you are on windows you can use awk95 (from somewhere in web-space). Czes'c' Maciej -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._