From: John Powers Some time ago I made available something I wrote called SYMFILE, and I had a number of people who mailed me asking for a copy. As a Decus member, I would be pleased to make it available for the Decus software collection. The current version, v2.2-00 is, however, not yet alpha ready. I hope to achieve that for v3. If you wish, I can email it to you, or you can get it by anonymous FTP from ftp.blackwell.co.uk in directory VMS. Whatever you like. What is the normal way of making contributions? So you can decide if it's worth the effort, here is the extract from the top of the help file.. SYMFILE is a package that can be used to redirect any output from DCL or from any program, directly into symbols in the user's process. Any output can be redirected to SYMFILE, and for every line of output, a symbol will be created of the form , where is a user-defined prefix, and is a running count of all the symbols created. When the output closes, another symbol gets created containing a count of the symbols created. The prefix, the format of the number, and the name of the count symbol can be changed with the FAOSTR and COUNT qualifiers, or the PREFIX qualifier. If output from a program needs to be manipulated in DCL, this can be used as a short-cut, to save the need of redirecting the output to a temporary file, reading through this file creating the symbols, then closing and deleting the temporary file. .. and that's it. Let me know if you think its worth adding to the library. You are very welcome to it. And thanks for all the tremendous work you do in making all those other useful packages available to us. - Cheers. John. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Powers - Blackwell's, Oxford - - "fee issuing thirty mails" (anag.) john.powers@blackwell.co.uk (Internet) Blackwells Booksellers - Visit our PSI%234284400179::TJGP (PSImail) home page: http://www.blackwell.co.uk/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------