Meh. Nice idea perhaps, but not working. Oh well. There are some possible tricks anyway. You could create a file on the remote machine if allowed, and check the timestamp. You can also check local time using remote datatrieve. If you have a decnet-aware finger server, that might tell you. And of course, if you can log in or run remote jobs, anything can be done. But how about expanding the host.txt file (or whatever the name was)? Johnny --