Joe I am so sorry to have wasted your time. I tried to get back quickly before anyone replied to avoid this but I was too late! Thank you so much for your help - but the missing 'x-factor' was that I am a complete prat. I had not substituted the full directory path for the 'usr' bit in the first line of my script. What an idiot. It is quite normal that the guestbook.txt was empty as I haven't yet been able to write a message to it. Once again - I am really sorry. I'm going away now quietly to crawl into a hole and hide! Perhaps I'll take up knitting Anmaco