>>>Just out of interest which version of Hypercard are you people using? 

I believe the final release version was 2.4.1., that's what I'm using.

What's particularly frustrating is that the last few versions of Hypercard each became significantly better, faster stronger, etc. To give you an example on a weekly basis I import into an empty stack a document that contains every TV program on about 100 channels for one week, resulting in a stack that has thousands of cards, each with about a dozen fields. I then use that to find/mark/filter and export various TV listings for publication, the web etc. I also have a version that I use for a single day's listings and another that imports three weeks of listings (about 20 megs.)

None of the Hypercard replacements that I've tries (Revolution, Supercard, and a few others) can efficiently handle stacks that big, plus while some have some nifty features, all of them are missing some basic Hypercard functionality (like marking cards, for example.)  

I dread having to move to anything else, but will soon have to. I've noticed with the lastest Mac OS X upgrade I can no longer edit scripts when launching Hypercard via Classic, but have to launch OS 9.x. Also, the screen size is limited in OS X and I've had to drop all my fancy visual effects in OS X. Maybe they're trying to wean us from using it, if so, they're being jerks!

As for the shell scripting question, to expand on Jon's comment about directing the command to an OS X app, I've been sending shell script commands to the terminal and executing them in a terminal window, which works like a charm, and gives me the added luxury of being able to test a command in the terminal and get the same results in a script. That doesn't always work with the do shell script command (for me, at least).

HTH

ES