I am trying to set up some rules to build files with locally installed tools. I have no trouble getting my rules to work, and to invoke shell commands with sh(). However, what I can't figure out is how to get a display of shell commands without actually excecutiing them. I thought I could run 'rake --dry-run' but that seems to display only the filenames that would be updated. I've found that setting 'verbose true' in my Rakefile causes the shell commands to be displayed as they are executed. And I've found that setting 'nowrite true' does EXACTLY what I want, but I can't figure out how to turn it on via a rake command flag. I looked in the rake.rb source (rake-0.8.3), and it LOOKS like --dry-run should set both 'verbose' and 'nowrite' for me. But I can't seem to get actual verbose or dryrun behaviors unless I set them in my Rakefile. What am I missing here? Thanks. LW -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.