I won't be at all upset if this patch doesn't make it in. I haven't yet thought of a really good use for it. Whilst reading the manpage for the Plan9 shell rc(1), I saw: ----------------------------8< cut here >8------------------------------ . [-i] file [arg ...] Reads file as input to rc and executes its contents. With a -i flag, input is interactive. Thus from within a shell script, . -i /dev/tty does the ``right thing''. ----------------------------8< cut here >8------------------------------ I couldn't resist. :^) -Phil