Hi BrowserUK,

Thanks for your explanation - this sort of details (the parens) can really kill you and I finished last week with the flu 0 just in time for a lovely 3-day week-end.
Oh well... As for the relevancy of the codem the sleep(5) was for the sake of testing and isn't in the final code. As a matter of fact I've dropped the thread use here to implement it at a higher level when integrating perl into VC++.

For the sake of this node, my purpose was to have an ongoing (neverending) thread that'd monitor the hard drive and detect whether changes occured - but this bit of code doing the monitoring blockc the rest of the code. It was then necessary to have it in a separate thread so that I could still use the GUI and do other stuff...

Thanks again for your insight and surely see you soon round another node.