search for: highway15

...tries to retain the naming information present in 'x'. If 'use.names = FALSE' all naming information is dropped. Hence, I find it odd that I see the following: > b <- list("highway1"=1:5) > unlist(b) highway11 highway12 highway13 highway14 highway15 1 2 3 4 5 I suspect this is essential behavior for something or other, but it seems that this approach is inefficient for large lists and in many contexts does not preserve names, but invents new ones. /me ducks + seth