There are common routines for this type of things, and they don't know why they are being called or by whom, so this is just not feasible. Another thing is that list management commands are a typical example of the kind of thing you may want to write a short program to automate. You want the program to have predictable results, so context or registration dependent syntax is not a good idea. The PASCAL commands generally accept options with or without opening parenthesis, and support VMS-style alternatives. For instance, with 1.8a you can SET XYZ REPRO/USER=*@* or SET XYZ/NOMAIL/FILES. I don't want to get into the business of maintaining parallel lists of one-character unix options. Eric