LDBASE.COM was supposed to be an INTERACTIVE access tool, like LDBASE EXEC for VM. But then it seems to have turned out to be quite tough difficult to implement (I guess the problem is trapping incoming messages?), so the entry stayed here for a long time without the file being available. Jim eventually decided something had to be done and wrote a user interface for BATCH submission, which is called LDBASE.COM but is NOT what the documentation refers to. I'm waiting for a definite answer to the question "Can an interactive tool be developed for VMS or not" to decide what to do exactly - I'm getting conflicting replies from different sources, and since I'm completely incompetent on VMS stuff I cannot make anything out of the justifications, so I'm still in (enabled) wait state... :-) Eric