Hi, I might be doing something wrong, but it appears that calling any non-lisp command (example: /usr/bin/tail) causes the variable set in the {} block of "for var in list {}" to change to nil. To duplicate, please create a file "bug.txt" in ~tmp, echo "line one" > ~/tmp/bug.txt then run the following code - In the code below, *please replace my full path "/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt" with your full path. There seems to be an unrelated issue trying to list ~/tmp/bug.txt* for file in (list "/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt") { type-of $file echo "file=$file"; # Create a variable. The back and forth between .log and .txt is # only there to simulate some useful work to set value of samefile export samefile="${echo $file(:s/.txt/.log/)}"(:s/.log/.txt/); echo "samefile=$samefile" # Note that on my system, 'which tail' ==> /usr/bin/tail tail $file # Note that on my system, 'which cat' ==> eshell/cat is a byte-compiled Lisp function in ‘em-unix.el’. # cat $file echo "samefile=$samefile" echo "file=$file"; } Actual result: ================ string file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt samefile=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt line one samefile=nil file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt ================ Please *note how the contents of samefile is nullified. This is the bug I am reporting here* Expected result: ================ string file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt samefile=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt line one samefile=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt ================ Notes: 1. I tried this with other non-lisp functions (/usr/bin/gzip) and it caused the same issue. 2. If we use "cat" which is an elisp function, the loop works as expected. Thanks, Milan Zimmermann