So I got this job, right? Very non-techie. They give me an NT box at my desk, which is OK because the job requires that I use Outlook and Project and Visio and such. I seethe, but in silence. I got these colo (full service hosting) guys, right? And they're idiots. Not all of them, but enough bad apples that the whole sack kinda smells funny. And we start getting net problems (like REALLY slow traffic). So my CM sez to me, he sez "what if we (meaning 'we' like 'you') wrote a little script (I told him I was off to do that scripting class last week, now he knows) to copy some files hither andd yon, and we can time it. Then if it's slow, we have a problem." So I say "ya, lemme think on it, that could be OK." SO I do the thinking part, and I turn out a slick bit of perl code. Check http://gtf.org/austin/taos/perl to see the code. Check tomorrow, I'm lazy and don't have it up yet. So I work up this bit of Perl, because I know NT has Perl, and in fact *our* NT has Perl. And I happen to like Perl. So I write theis slick little script, right? It fork()s a process, that becomes the client. Client randomly sleep()s, picks a random machine (from a list of hosts) connects to it, counts the stuff that spews forth (as it happens, the strings "boogity\n" 10*1024*1024 times), reports the time (seconds). Simple, but close enough for gov't work. The parent process (after the fork(), remember?) listens for the connect, fork()s a client, the client then sends some data ("boogity\n" * 10485760). I test this in the lab (I was in the lab for my first SA2 class; I passed the sample test, first try, thankyouverymuch), it works great. If you eyeball the code you'll notice that it looks lots like a man() page for perlipc; crazy, the conincidences. So I get that stuff to my environment, associate "perl" with the file, and ... NT AIN'T GOT NO FORK. What's up with that? --- J Austin David There's no accounting for taste. http://gtf.org/austin austin@gtf.org If Rocker can throw, who cares that he's an ass?