Good point and I will look at the module - but as I'm closing the file and (in the case of backticks) never opening anything I don't hold out much hope. The odd thing about open from the pipe output is that if you hit EOF then it looks like Windows closes the temporary file before the Perl close gets a chance and strange warnings are sometimes produced. It sometimes worries me that the beta of ActiveState 5.6 was only available for W2000 and NT not W9x.