I don't understand your first statement. I thought that if you wrote your own function/routine/blah you can have it return anything you might like to handle -

I don't understand your first statement. I thought that if you wrote your own function/routine/blah you can have it return anything you might like to handle - in one side and out the other. {print_this_garbage_out=`do_a_little_dance` #maybe even with awk|sed|perl|python|sql|mom retval_for_something_hopefully_cool=$? # or some other requisite test/set, limit sky echo "${print_this_garbage_out}" return ${retval_for_something_hopefully_cool}} # don't exit, because that might be silly The bash is sort of like your machine code, it, like your machine, can use anything it has access to, if told properly. So I don't understand "can't even return a value". I don't know much about bash for bash's sake so I'm wondering if I may have missed something along the way.