I have cobbled together a perl module to act, in effect, as a varient of 'system', with the added feature of being able to get to both the STDOUT and STDERR of a child process. More specialized and cheaper to run than Open3. Anyway, the way I'm privately using it: use System2; my @args = qw(ls -laF); my ($status, $out, $err) = system2(@args); print "OUT: $out\n"; my ($exit, $signal, $core) = &System2::exit_status($status); etc. Does anyone have any suggestions suggestions for a proper namespace for this? -- Brian 'you Bastard' Reichert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 37 Crystal Ave. #303 Daytime number: (603) 434-6842 Derry NH 03038-1713 USA Intel architecture: the left-hand path