>Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, I need to switch back to the old concatenation technique.

Another option is to use the "?" and "??" commands. That is what I usually use, to create text-files.

IIRC, the commands are something like this:

SET ALTERNATE TO MYFILE.TXT
SET ALTERNATE ON
SET CONSOLE OFF

?? "First line"
? "Second line"
? "Third", "line"

SET CONSOLE ON
SET ALTERNATE OFF
SET ALTERNATE TO

modify command myfile.txt && to check the results

Other options include @..SAY, and LLFF.

All of these options are probably faster than concatenation.

You may want to create a class, with wrappers for functions like "open text file", "close text file", "output a line", etc. - that way, if you later find it convenient to use "@...say" instead of "?", for instance, you only have to change this in one single place. Or just use my download #9991, which already has these wrappers.

Hilmar.