Hi, Can anyone shed some light On This One? tl;dr: Enclosing a nested length eval on an empty var changes its answer from 0 to 1 when in double quotes. % for baz in "" "inga"; do echo ${#${baz}} "${#${baz}}" ${#baz} "${#baz}" done 0 1 0 0 4 4 4 4 % Normally I wouldn't mail the list about this kind of thing, but this one's just too weird. Thoughts? %Ian - Ian F plus one, seven oh seven, seven three seven, four twenty-one zero. Big hitter, the Lama.