Sorry for the follow-up, rather than mail, other users from this site have had problems mailing to ARPA-land. Sounds like your problem is the stdio library is getting an error about an interrupted read, and is closing down the I/O. Try a clearerr on stdin. Michael Meissner Data General Corporation ...{ ihnp4, decvax }!mcnc!rti-sel!rtp47!meissner