Id like to convert it to uppercase for the simple purpose of formatting so it will adhere to a future case statement. As I thought case statements are case sensitive. I see all over the place the tr command used in concert with echo commands to give you immediate results such as: echo "Enter in Location (i.e. SDD-134)" read answer (user enters "cfg" echo $answer | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' which produced cfg # first echo not upper? echo $answer #echo it again and it is now upper... CFG