I don't think i clearly explained in my initial post what I'm trying to achieve. We don't want the filename and group name to be the same. Let me elaborate: The shop I work at has 21 nc machines and we want the nc file name name to be, for example, filename.nc10.nc This tells us what machine the program has been posted for (nc10) and the additional .nc extension tells us the program is "unproven" and has not yet been run at the machine. We know all of this by merely looking at the file name. When we're thru running the program and making any kind of necessary edits at the machine, we send it back thru dnc to the server. When it sends it back, it strips the original nc10.nc extension and what remains on the server is filename.nc10 This now tells us the program was run at machine 10 and that it's been "proven out" (no .nc extension). This is all fine and dandy but in order for it to work, the nc file must have in its' first line the name of the program with no extension at all. In other words, the first line of the nc program must contain only "filename", with no extension. The machine number is appended to the end of the filename when we send it back thru the dnc. By the way, I'm already well aware of the "sextnc" command and if you use something such as "sextnc NC10.NC", Windows will puke on it and output a file named this: FILENAME.NC10.NC10.NC10.NC Again, the filename and toolpath group name must not be the same. (Filename needs 2 extensions, toolpath group must have no extension and the post must output what is in the toolpath group name.) sorry for the long winded explanation here but as I mentioned in my original post, it's kind of involved and abstract. Thanks again

hello again everyone and sorry for the delay in responding. stepped away from the computer for a while to grab some lunch. thanks for all the suggestions and i'll take a look at them individually to see what works for me

Hi We're currently using the following code at the "Start of file for non-zero tool number": *progno, "(", progname, ")", e For reasons that are way too involved to bore you with, we'd like for the post to output something more like: *progno, "(", Toolpath Group 1, ")", e In other words, we want the output that appears on this line in our nc file to reflect what the name of the operation group is and not what the program name is. Thanks in advance. -------------------- Level 3 MIll Ver 9.1SP2 with Solids running on Win XP