I finally see the main part of my problem. Parsing the "." works and getting the filename works, but kixtart doesnt seem to like sending that value to shell.

ex.
Shell "%compspec% /c ping $filename"

that seems to be my problem all along. When I run debug and look at what is being sent to shell, I get the whole directory listing. This must not be a variable that is able to be sent to a shell command. If anyone knows of a way of doing this Id stop ranting about this. :-)

Thanks again

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WonderBoy Constantly learning everyday, how much I dont know :-)