There's an extension of gretl's shell capabilities in the works. Sorry, not available for Windows just yet, but on *nix you can now (current CVS) capture output from shell commands in a string variable, using "$(command)", and you also have a subset of C's sscanf to process such strings. Here are a few examples: <script> nulldata 10 string fnum = $(ls | wc -l) scalar n sscanf @fnum, "%d", &n printf "There are %d files in this directory\n", n string bessel = $(echo "j(3,10)" | bc -l) scalar j sscanf @bessel, "%lf", &j printf "Bessel function, order 3, of 10 = %.15g\n", j ! echo "1 2 3 4" > mat.txt ! echo "5 6 7 8" >> mat.txt string mat = $(cat mat.txt) printf "mat (string form) = \n%s\n", @mat matrix m sscanf @mat, "%m", &m print m </script> The allowable sscanf conversions are "d" (int), "lf" (double), "s" or "[stuff]" (string) and "m" (matrix). With matrix conversion we proceed along the input string so long as we're able to read doubles, with space or tab counting as column separator and CR-LF, LF or CR counting as row separators. Allin