note TheDamian <blockquote><i> Using the configuration file below I obtain a blank entry when listing all the keys in %config. </i></blockquote> That's because every config file starts with the "nameless" section. As soon as you name a section, it shifts to that section instead but, even if your first line is a section marker, there will still be an entry for the nameless section (which had no data) in the resulting hash. <p>Arguably however, that's unintuitive, and the nameless section ought not appear in the resulting hash unless it has actual contents. I'll patch the next release to work that way. <blockquote><i> Also, when adding a new section, a blank line separates the section name from the entry of that section </i></blockquote> Yes, that's the standard behaviour. And, no, there's currently no way of altering it. I guess <tt>read_config</tt> could look at the input file's layout and intuit whether you're separating section markers from config variables. I'll look at adding that behaviour too. <p>Damian 516639 516639