Thank you for replying to my question. I had not heard of ssh before; now I have researched it a little, I am frightened to try any contact with the host servers other than ftp and using a standard web browser. I have not found anything within Perl to access other sites except redirection ( print redirect ), but as I seem to discover something new every day, I thought there may well be lots of commands just waiting to be used! I guess I was hoping access would be the same as from a browser. Thank you again for your trouble.