Hi all, I promised to tell you when I cracked this nasty little problem of mine, though it's somewhat embarrassing for me:
in short, don't put shell scripts called ld or cc in your /usr/local/bin. I had an ld script to give me lists of directories in a certain format and then forgot about its existence, until I had the happy idea to type 'ld' on the command line to see what would happen. at least now I know that I've really grown old. again, thank you for all your efforts to help me. kind regards, michael
