Thanks for all the information. First thing, I am able to connect to the server using the script, since I do not get any error message when I run it. I tried using "dir\n", but I still got the output as "1". The thing that I forgot to mention in my earlier post is that when I use "cmd" with double or single quotes around "dir", the output is blank, but when i use backticks with "cmd", I get the error message "bad named parameter....". Thank you again.