I have finished the first cut of the JSpawn class and a small test, and I am working to get them compiled. I got the paths set up to run the jdk from the command prompt and it will work -- so I can avoid eclipse for the time being. I need to test it just a little more then I'll send it to list and ask JohnB if he wants to try it. I have a few things to do to test it, but my xp laptop is dying a slow painful death as I work. I moved a lot of stuff to an external hard drive to free up the C drive, but it is still pretty shaky. I can probably copy it all to John's linux machine and test it on linux, which is much friendlier. Meanwhile, javac can't find a few symbols so I need to hunt for packages to import. More in a bit. I don't know how long it will take as testing is unpredictable. Does anyone know if there is a cat command on windows? I need a small program that isn't a shell script to test this code. --le