In reply to a recent posting of mine one or two people suggested removing the $ sign from the start of the variables in my firewall script. In R. Ziegler's book he definitely uses $ at the start of variables. Is it just a convention that $ are/are not used or is there some other reason? I know this isn't really a firewall question but I wanted to make sure my query reaches the people who kindly replied to my previous posting. :-) TIA Mike