Thanks Larry . What that means is that input/output operations will not be interactive, as they are (or tend to be) without that option, which causes prompts not to be issued and no startup message to be displayed. Here is a nearly minimal (and maximally useless) example with output [a]: > echo .quit | sqlite3 -batch > . (That is no output.) So that something like <br> cat script | sqlite3 -batch where script may have lines of .commands and statements inter mixed and output will be clean results ie. without prompt lines etc. I will have to test that soon. John