Another crutch upon which have propped myself up is the dateToStamp and stampToDate commands in Tanaka's OSAX, and it's not immediately clear to me if there's an alternate way in OS X to handle date manipulations like that. For example, if I want to coerce a a string (i.e. "mmddyyyy") into a date, I'm completely beholden to Tanaka's to do that. Any clues? WES