Volodya, Sorry about the formatting. It annoys me too. However, I'm using Earthlink's online Web Mail, so I'm stuck with some of their choices. There new mail (available RSN) may have a formatting option. RE: exception DOH! I should have thought of that. For everything else, I'm always very careful to check for exceptions. In this case, I tacitly assume it worked like getopts and just left unknown options on the command line. (Old habits die hard.) I haven't got time to try now, but I will put in the exception handlers and see what it's complaining about with my positional parameter. I realize that "bomb" wasn't very precise, but it was hard to describe what happened. First, Zone Alert would become excited and claim that my program was attempting to do something "dangerous". (Yes, that should have clued me in to an exception being thrown, but I was dense.) If I told Zone Alert to let it happen, then Windows popped up a dialog offering to send a report to Microsoft about my incompetence. :-) Thanks for your help. Merrill