this is otherwise known as how to shove a round peg in a square hole. but the inefficency doesn't much matter. i have an ancient unix program called tel. i wrote it in 1988 so it has no relation to tel(1). tel is a simple address book. recently it's been abused to store account information that would be useless in factotum, such as dsl account passwords. the format has been blocks of name tab value seperated by blank lines. i've had two problems with tel. foremost, it's insecure. but it's always been a pain to search. secstore would be secure enough and ndb could be easier to search. one problem. ndb assumes full exact matches and i don't often remember exactly. the solution to that was ndb/requery, which matches regular expressions but is otherwise the same as ndb/query. for example: ; ndb/requery dom aska dom aska.quanstro.net oldaska.quanstro.net stel is a little wrapper that takes care of security details. - erik