Still wants a bit of banging on, but I think it's kinda close. Comments for how it could be prettier or more eficient very welcome:-). Find attached a module, and a trivial little test driver that prompts for input lines; it wants one of 3 kinds of input: use dirname [depth] key=val key A bare key will print the val. -Bennett P.S. After I've hammered on this a bit more I'l be getting a PAUSE id and uploading to CPAN. Attachment converted: macnas:DB_FileSys.pm (TEXT/R*ch) (0002104F) Attachment converted: macnas:dbsh (TEXT/R*ch) (00021050)