hey, i tried your suggestion and it worked fine... it just does not apply for scripts with loops. coz you said that if the selection requires only a carriage return just leave a blank or use ^M or ^V. well the blank thing work it just that if the script that you are trying to run the macro will loop at the end the output will be that it will endlessly try to throw in the carriage return as a result of an endless loop.

to illustrate the script constains the following loop:

until "$quit" = "y"
do

(menu1)
(menu2)
(menu3)
...

done

see my problem? after issuing all the command at the end it will see only carriage return. i only solution i could think of is to quit the application and try to run the script again. anyway, thank you very very much for the reply. i learned a lot from this site. i hope to seek more answers from all of you