Thank you very much. It works. Here my minor reason to want that. I also know I was entering an unusual field (I would even accept to relax sometimes the 'use strict "refs"' to use symbolic references). My command line script is expected to dump a 'usage' message (with the list of options) and a GetOptions to load them. For my personal taste I didn't like to replicate the same list in the 'usage' message and in GetOptions. I wanted a single list of options and then I'm using that list to both create the message and to feed GetOptions. Thanks again.