At some point you have to trust your DBA, if that is not present, you have bigger problems than cron jobs. auditors lack humor, so don't tell them I said so. so, if DBA's cannot run it, then unix SA's should run the cron jobs? If so, do you completely trust your SA? BTW, to heck with cronjob, use dbms_job, if you want you can still do the damage using dbms_job. Raj -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l