Dear Jonathan, please take your time and give us some more details on what you did; otherwise, it will be difficult for us to guess what you are fighting with.

1. Any ideas? Is this a limitation or a bug? I have not looked through the source code yet.

See above ;)

2. Is there any way to insert comments in the command file that is passed on basex –c filename.xq ?

Yes, lines with # are interpreted as comments and are skipped. By the way, the default extension for BaseX command scripts is .bxs (see [1]).

3. Am I supposed to be able to split the for loop onto multiple lines? It does not appear so.

Open factbook for $x in /mondial/country where $x/languages="English" return $x/religions

In order to process this query, you’ll have to add db:open('factbook') before /mondial. You can also specify an initial input via -i (see [2]). Hope this helps, Christian [1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Commands#Command_Scripts [2] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Startup_Options#BaseX_Standalone