Valdis, clearly the guy who wrote this sentence is incompetent. First, the restriction has always been there, from the very first version. It was not documented, but it was there. This is the reason why IBM changed the userids *ALLOC*, *TEMP* into $ALLOC$, etc. You couldn't even DIRM GET these. Second, the dash is a valid CMS filename character. So we have two possibilities: (1) the guy didn't know that new characters had been added to the original A-Z 0-9 #$@ set, and the documentation is incorrect, or (2) the guy didn't know that new characters had been added to the original set, coded the validation routine accordingly, and we'll have to fight another Broken As Designed APAR closing. Eric