Grant Edwards wrote: >How about: > > names = ['a','b','c'] > list1 = map(open,names,['r','r','r']) > print list1 > list2 = map(lambda f: f.read(), list1) > print list2 You probably shouldn't do it that way since with enough names you might run out of available file descriptors (eg, 64 on the box where I first ran into the problem :) Andrew dalke at acm.org