I would definitely recommend taking a look. Formats are the kind of thing you learn how to do once, then go back and look it up in a reference manual when you need it six months later. :-) Write formats are good for plain text reports, nice debugging output, log files, that sort of thing.

The reason you probably haven't seen much of it around here, or around other "mentors", is because pretty much anything fancier than "*** SQL: warning, could not prepare statement" is usually a good candidate for Tk, X/HTML, or something along those lines. Knowhutimean?

Alakaboo