>>That wonder, until you need to specify a path on the command line that contains embedded spaces or your sep character (especially the tilde, which is often used in the short name derived from a long file name.) Quote encapsulation works there unambiguously.
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>True... but, we are saying the same thing. Pass ONE parameter. Isn't that the result of doing...
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>"Mary Had A Little Lamb"
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>Or does that come through as 5 parameters?

No, you still have to parse it; quote encapsulation passes everything within quotes as a single string. If I want multiple parameters, I'd pick something else to use as a parse character that I know isn't in use, and quote-encapsulate the whole mess, something like:

"Mary hard a little lamb, a little pork, a little jam..."

using comma as the sep character in this example, it could be parsed into 3 strings. I'd probably pick something other than a legal character for a file name to make my life easier; the vertical bar, since it serves as a pipe character in a command line and can't be part of a file name, would be a natural choice.

Once you have the string in VFP as a string, there are any number of ways to handle parsing, including the FOXTOOLS word-related functions.

Quote encapsulation gets around the problem that many of the common characters that are treated as separator characters by the command line parser are needed inside parameters frequently.
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>BOb