CR> !!! this is what i intended to do originally, but i think my first attempt i must have done something wrong because it coredumped when i did the strlen. but while your patch looks reasonable, it is behaving rather strangely for me. if I eval that bit of test code I sent in, I either get very long blank menus or menu entries longer than they should be. I realized that the code as written was not very robust, but I had assumed that whomever wrote must have had a good reason for doing it that way. Are my screwy results repeatable by anyone