Actually the machine is located remotely and I would like to know by polling robtest when all the slots are available for reloading or removing tapes (humans on the other side). I would set an alarm on PC and then load the next 10 into the slots instead of constantly checking. There is an ancient version of Perl on the Netbackup machine and d/l modules etc. is an issue on that machine. Thanks for the reply! BigSwifty