Bernard> I was expecting an exception from the following getopt.getopt() Bernard> called, but didn't. Is it normal? Yes. There's nothing invalid about "-d" as an argument to the "-c" flag, so getopt gobbles it up. -- Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/) Boycott Netflix - they spam - http://www.musi-cal.com/~skip/netflix.html