Sven Mascheck: Well the original implementation (post 7th ed and 4.0/4.1 BSD) didn't allow arguments at all ;-) ====== I believe you're mistaken. All the implementations I've ever used allowed a single argument in the #! line, and inserted the name of the script between that (if present) and the arguments given to exec. e.g. if ./lipsum began with #!/usr/bin/awk -f awk would be invoked with `/usr/bin/awk -f ./lipsum ...'. Without allowing one argument for -f or the like, #! wouldn't have been useful for much but the shell. Norman Wilson Toronto ON