oops. It doesn't work in the tcl environ after all. The list doesn't appear to be passing out of the proc. Looking through Tcl for Web Nerds, Practical Programming in Tcl/Tk, 4th ed., and google, I don't seem to find an exact example of a list being returned as a parameter (as I understand ns_getscsv returns the list). Maybe it will have to be passed with global? I'm going to have to sleep on it...