No white space. I checked to make sure of that from command line as opposed to running it as a CGI app (what it's intended to do). If you have a way of accomplishing what I need to do using the open function I'm all ears but I've already posted what I wanted to do prior to this and open doesn't seem to cut the cake. I need to open a file and have a lock on it, read in contents, modify those contents, have those contents written back to the file (overwrite everything in the file with the new stuff), and then release the lock. open didn't work for me.