Oy. I kind of solved my problems with ps, just by recompiling the source.. I think I've got reasons to believe that /bin/ps as distributed in the installation set on minnie is corrupt; it only dumps core. As a side note, /var/run/psdatabase is corrupt too; normally this wouldn't matter (since ps -U recompiles this, and since ps -U is run in /etc/rc), but since ps dumps core... Anyway; If I would've known about /var/run/psdatabase, it might have prevented me from searching a non-existant bug during the last few months :) -- Martijn van Buul - Pino(a)dohd.org - http://www.stack.nl/~martijnb/ Geek code: G-- - Visit OuterSpace: mud.stack.nl 3333 Kees J. Bot: The sum of CPU power and user brain power is a constant.