Ok Guys, I humbly apologise for not working this out from day one :-) The problem was that I'd mounted the device after fstab from the desktop and SuSE in this configuration appears to prevent shell scripts from being fired off. If I mount everything in fstab at boot time then it all works. Don't know whether this is a general SuSE thing or whether it is just a "feature" of the version that I'm running (8.2). Well, you live and learn don't you :-) Chears and thanks for all of the advice, through which I learn't stuff so it wasn't all that bad. Robin