more oddities in my travels, this from Doc.../config.txt: "The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next section begins. Section names are case-insensitive. Only alphanumeric characters, `-` and `.` are allowed in section names. ^ ????? what? how can section names contain periods? reading further, "Sections can be further divided into subsections. To begin a subsection put its name in double quotes, separated by space from the section name, in the section header, like in the example below: -------- [section "subsection"] ok, so how on earth would i use "git config" at the command line to set a config variable with some arbitrary level of subsections? let's try this: $ git config --global a.b.c.d.e rday huh ... seemed to work fine, and added this to my ~/.gitconfig: [a "b.c.d"] e = rday as i see it, the first component is intgerpreted as the section name, the last component is the variable/key(?) name, and everything in between is treated as subsection(s), which is not at all obvious from that Doc file, or from "man git-config". and if a section name can contain periods, how would you specify that at the command line? rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca/dokuwiki Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================