Just curious; am I the only who, back in the early days of V6, used pipes as temporary files? I mean that after calling pipe(), instead of then forking and playing "file-descriptor footsie" you just read and wrote within the same process. I seem to recall that it worked, as long as you avoided the 8-block limit (or whatever it was then); I have no idea why I tried it, other than to see if it worked i.e. avoid the creat() (without the "e") etc. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."