Sorry, all my previous email sent out have somehow remained as uuencoded. I am using gmail and my browser is firefox. But I think I found the reason for that, as verified by this email....embedded within the email there must not be any unicode character - which I have presently removed. The answer to the previous email should be readtim and writetim field of v$filestat. Thanks to Eugene and Yong Huang for the assistance rendered. -- Regards, Peter Teoh -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l