Just a note: the issue with needing 2 '\' to escape the ',' may be also be related to the shell that you ran ldapsearch in eating the 1st '\'. So, the first \ escapes the second \, which causes a \ to be sent to ldapsearch, which escapes the comma. This post happened to pique my interest because I just fixed a bug in a shell script related to a similar problem and thought this may keep somebody else from losing their sanity with \'s. Good luck, gary. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4065063#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...