Thanks again for your reply. > The normal exit does flush and close all open file descriptors, I thought that was the case, so had not worried about closing the files.
> so what you are seeing is odd. I agree. I've used some varied Unix systems in the past, and never had this. > Now, the normal exit is part of the "run time" (crt0 or a similar name, that > calls main and cleans up after) and that part is statically linked so, > unless it depends on functionality on a Windows dll, it should not vary > between machines. Is there any way of checking which particular Windows.dll it could be needing? Could there be any serial port setting that may be affecting it? Incidentally I'm run a one minute cron job (for the working process) - would that affect anything? > I don't know if those basic libraries get Windows patches (updates in > Microsoft-talk)... could be worth trying. Ok understand in principal what you're saying. I have automatic updates configured and scheduled. > > Is there a limit to the number of files on XP - like the old config.sys > > option files=99? > I don't know. Would archiving files to a separate directory help? > That's a weird one, I have no idea what is going on (I was thinking about > anti-virus or similar software that prevent creating files, but it doesn't > look quite like that). I have the same Anti-virus software on both PCs - AVG (and firewall). I could try an additional test on my laptop - but not sure what that would tell me. What do you think? Incidentally AVG does a scheduled virus scan nightly and finds nothing. Incidentally I tried something else today. I created a shell script junk.sh that did the following: echo "starting problem program" ./problem_program echo "ending problem program" I ran this with ./junk.sh > junk.txt Surprise, surprise in junk.txt I got starting problem program ending problem program with again none of problem_program's output! * Is the chkdsk error significant, or is it just a "red herring" do you think? * Have you ever heard of anything similar on Linux/Unix? * Does windows have a lock on a file or something? * I'm sure I haven't, but if something in the program redirected 'stdout', would this have any affect like I'm experiencing - i.e. overriding the command line's redirection? Cheers Andy Burgess -- _____ ______ _____________________________________________ //_ / /| /_ / / __//__ / / |/__ / /...Your friendly computer professionals ____________________/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/