Glad these are turning out to be useful.

I have always been fascinated by what I guess can be called 'command languages'. I have worked with the GEORGE operating system that had a fairly basic one, and VMS, which which had DCL (Digital Command Language), which grew to be fairly sophisticated during my time using it. However, in comparison, I find Bash to be considerably more sophisticated. Still not a true language with features like those you describe, but nevertheless worth working with I think.

It's this that motivates me to describe what can be done with Bash, and I amuse myself trying to do things that stretch my imagination a bit :-)

Dave