Carl, thank you for your comments and especially your elucidation of the nature of the kbd file and why there are different comment markers. As to everything else I only disagree on one point: >> In my installation trying to open a file in the current directory by >> just giving the file name on the command line doesn't work. It >> creates a buffer with the right title but no content. A full path >> name is necessary, for instance >> >> xyscript foo.txt >> >> doesn't work but >> >> xyscript /home/bnewell/foo.txt >> >> does work. > > That's not surprising. If your shell command is a bare "xyscript" (no > path), it means that the current working directory is the directory > with the xyscript executable, which presumably is different from > /home/bnewell. Paths on the command line are resolved with respect to > the CWD. But this is not typical command behavior. If I am in the /home/bnewell directory, in which there is a file called 'foo.txt' I should expect this to open with xyscript foo.txt or at worst xyscript ./foo.txt without having to give the full path to the directory I'm already in. (This assumes of course that 'xyscript' is somewhere in the command path.) Apologies for disagreeing :) With aloha from Hawai`i nei Bob Newell Honolulu