I guess I'm just being dense. I see (and did look at before) the 'join' function in the text functions section of the info pages, but I can't see how to take this: A = /usr/bin /bin and use $(join) to get A = /usr/bin:/bin Could you demontrate how you would get from one to the other? The 'join' function seems to me to always return a list with the same number of elements as the list that was passed in. In fact, the info page says specifically that white space is replaced with a single space. I want to replace internal whitespace with a specified separator. Michael Sterrett -Mr. Bones.- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make