note davies Thanks, all, for the help. I've gone down the command line switch route and have got my code working. But the code has two areas that smell to me, so I come again pleading for help. :-) I have tests in three files that are called from a fourth, which is as follows: <c> use strict; use warnings; use Test::Harness; runtests(["podext.t"], ["excelpod.bat"], ["ExcelPOD.t"]); </c> This works fine, but I don't like the business of having to run the .bat file. However, I can't find any way of putting a command such as <c>excelpod.pl -t</c> with command line parameters into the list of test files to be run without getting an error. The second smell is in excelpod.pl, some of which is: <c> use if (1 == scalar @ARGV && "-t" eq $ARGV[0]), "Test::More"; ... if (0 < scalar @ARGV && '-t' eq $ARGV[0]) { #Tests no warnings; eval {"plan tests => 63;"}; use warnings; </c> If I write this without all the conditionals, everything works, but running in "live mode" (as opposed to test mode) I get a message saying that no test were run. This might be mistaken for an error message and cause confusion, so I want to suppress it. But writing the "use if" line means that running in live mode generates a compile time error when I give the test plan (and I can find no way of providing that in the "use if" command). Wrapping it in an "eval" command results in a warning of a useless use of a constant in void context, and the only way I can find to avoid that is to suppress warnings. As I say, the code is working and the tests are running, but I'd be a happier bunny either if I knew how to avoid the kludges or if I knew that they were unavoidable. Regards, John Davies 949648 949990