Your solution does however offer the chance to bring the thread back on topic. He could write a perl script to strip off the unwanted column! ;^)

Oh, by the way, if you should ever travel to Louisville, KY, let me know. I owe you a couple cases of beer or some such for all your work on the Sybase modules, etc. They've helped me quite a bit when I started with perl and Sybase.

...roboticus