I fail to see the usefulness of that.

It is eaiser to just run the program. Either way, it's the same number of steps. So far, COMMAND$ still looks to me like a just because you can doesn't mean you should statement. For me in order to be useful, it has to demonstrate a shortcut, improvement, or do something unique that cannot be done without it. (anything that can be accomplished a different way falls under 'shortcut').

Pete