Shawn,
Nice UDF - Ill use it...
Nice Doggerel too ...

Les,
I know what you mean - I think it was implemented in REXX as an external command to 'partition' it from the real language.
But integrating it would give the advantage of losing the %comspec% as you say.

MCA,
In Rexx there is a concept of a REXX Datastack - which is shareable from any REXX program. Programs can add items into it in a LIFO or FIFO fashion, This is how programs tend to share large pieces of information between subroutines (in REXX subroutines can be internal and external - the external ones cannot access variables of the parent).
Thus you can have a bunch of Rexx programs running (in parallel) and using the stack as a kind of bus to share info.
Now clearly maintaining this is no trivial deal - but it does mean that its possible to write extrenal programs and such which can very easily share data with REXX programs.

As Shawn commented - it does make housekeeping temp files etc much easier- and makes for elegant coding (as does Shawns UDF).

Its also very fast.

Mark

[ 18 October 2001: Message edited by: Mark Antrobus ]