On 18 Jun 2011, at 08:08, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote: OK, that's clear. After breakfast I will post more. deleting a file under vms requires: - the full name - sufficient rights and/or privileges A full filename means that the version numver must be included. DEL X.X wont work while DEL X.X;2 will Wildcards are permitted. If it is a security setting, try DIR/SEC *.COM. The protection is given for 4 (system) O (owner) G (group) or W (world). Can you post the command you entered? Yeah I read up and worked out the version thing DELETE SYS$MANAGER:DECW$PRIVATE_SERVER-SETUP.COM (obviously didn't work) DELETE SYS$MANAGER:DECW$PRIVATE_SERVER-SETUP.COM; DELETE SYS$MANAGER:DECW$PRIVATE_SERVER-SETUP.COM;* Non worked. All reported the file wasn't there (but by a different path which I can't recall) I was in Minimal boot mode (which cunningly you don't seem to be able to use the EDIT command in). I think I need to dig out an ethernet card for my terminal machine (old Toshiba Sat Pro laptop with a real serial port) so I can copy this stuff out of the terminal into e-mails better. Just to clarify as a default install OpenVMS did no create this file, I had to manually copy SYS$MANAGER:DECW$PRIVATE_SERVER-SETUP.TEMPLATE over to SYS$MANAGER:DECW$PRIVATE_SERVER-SETUP.COM to create it. This is covered in the HP docs and by Steve Hoffman. -- Mark Benson My Blog: <http://markbenson.org/blog> Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mdbenson "Never send a human to do a machine's job..."