Who said anything about systems programming? OK thats traditionally the domain in which a filesystem falls, but thats the client, not the server. Remember, NFS is designed to work over a network -- I once even mounted NFS over a dialup link -- so performance is not an issue (or at least, not until its proven to be one). This is discussed in the PerlFS documentation that I linked to in my original post. If I can write a web server in Perl, why not an NFS server? Surely its just a different protocol for essentially the same thing. --Dave