to all you coders out there be aware file locking behaves differently for NFS file systems under solaris 2.4... be warned doing a ufs file lock on a NFS file makes fcntl() hang.. it doesnt return an error, it hangs. anyway here is a snippet of code that does a work around.. instead of fcntl(fd,F_SETLK,&info); try this.. struct statvfs vfsbuf; cmd=F_SETLK; if(!fstatvfs(fd,&vfsbuf)&&!strcmp("nfs",vfsbuf.f_basetype)) cmd=F_RSETLK; fcntl(fd,cmd,&info); hope this helps.. Matt P.S. i have posted patches for both pine and elm to the sun-managers list -- #!/bin/sh echo '16i[q]sa[ln0=aln100%Pln100/snlbx]sbA0D3F204445524F42snlbxq'|dc;exit Matthew Keenan Systems Programmer Information Technology Division University of Technology Sydney Australia It's nice to be in a position where people apologize because they assume there's humor in your work, based on past experience, but they're not sure where it is. -- Rob Pike