Hi Zefram :)) Thanks a lot for your answer, fast and good :)) >There are several solutions. If you want to divide up a scalar value >in that way, add an "=" after the "$", so This will do, since none of my binaries (AFAIK) use $PAGER thru the shell... >You can also set the option SH_WORD_SPLIT, which does this >automatically for all variable substitutions, but this is a bad >idea, because it's often useful to retain spaces in a variable >expansion. Anyway, I need bash compatibility, so this is not a bad idea too. I'll try the second solution first. Thanks a lot again :)) Raśl