Yeah, I think they key is that if I dump the output of "top -b" to a file, like "top -b >>top.out", the name 'claws' appears as the command name. But if I send thru the IPC pipe, it turns to '3', which may be the filehandle's fileno? I don't know, but every other app I've tried seems to work Ok, so I posted it as a bug report with sylpheed-claws, so we will see what they say.