Well, sometimes. There are three scripts involved in the whole enterprise. The main routine (build.cgi) calls another called buildpag.cgi and buildpag.cgi calls harrisfilter.cgi. I've gotten this error on all three of the scripts at various times. I execute the main script using a web interface, so technically there is a process responsible for executing it too.

No other programs should have pipes to these files.

Yep, one of the child processes is for filtering raw Harris Pagination files. I'm trying to create a content management system for the web, where almost all of our content comes out of Harris. I'm going to give all these suggestions a shot and see if I can eliminate the problem by taking steps to ensure that no windows characters sneak in the files. I think Windows usually inserts a ^M or something like that at the end of each line.

I'll let you know what happens ...