David, Thanks for ur suggestion. I wanted to make number of "BUCK_*" as programmable. With every run of prog i want to have either "4/8/16/.." BUCKs in each entry. In a nut shell i am trying to mimic one kind of hash-table implementation,with bucket,entries e.t.c . I need the number of entries and buckets to be configurable from command line. Hence this approach i guess. Any better way of doing it would help. Thanks Abhay