Thanks Rob. Yes I ended up with a read(1) and use a field count and a few other checks to make sure I don't get a partial record. Serial is the "best of times and worst of times". Sure beats dealing with USB enumeration, power hungry ethernet processors and a lot of other stuff. I can still "see" serial on my o'scope which is always nice and I don't see it going away any time soon at least in the laboratory.
Python has been a bit of a chore-seems like a lot of verison/rev inconsistencies. At any rate I am going to stick with it. I used PERL in the past but I covet the stats packages and a few other things I lost when I left matlab and I want to try for chemometrics work. cheers fritz -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list