Fun! Now you need to write cmsh. Virtual Machine System Product. I'll have a look thro' my IBM junk at home this evening, but I don't think I've got much on it. IBM draw boundaries in different places, but under VM operating system (CP, Control Program) usually ran CMS Conversational Monitor System - a bit like a shell, hence my pun above... The first scripting language for VM/CMS was CMS EXEC. I never used it but I understand it was awful. Later came EXEC2 - lots of & characters (I think - or were they % characters?) to identify names, or reserved words, or something. This was still the official scripting language when I encountered VM, but I, like everyone else, used REXX. This has exhausted my memory - I'm off home. Philip.