Nimdokk, There is more to the code than what I have, and I have taken care of the curly braces too....The thing is the code works just fine when I run it from cmd line....the problem comes up when I try to put it on a cron... herveose...... I understand what you are saying about using 2 files....but we already hav a kron job which uses about 4 files...we want to put this job in 1 file.