Just out of curiosity, Bob, why did you switch from tcsh to bash? I suppose it'll start a religious war, but I actually TRIED switching to bash and then went back to tcsh. The "killer app" for me was that tcsh (from csh) had gobs of better pathname-editing operators (like dropping the extension), easily available; and a more familiar syntax. bash offered unfamiliar syntax, didn't have my beloved $i:r operation, and although it was better for programming, I figured perl was better than the shell ANYWAY.... There! That should roil the waters a bit! R