Bill Atkins wrote: > STDOUT.sync = true isn't necessary in that snippet. Even though you > haven't output a newline, the outbuffer will get flushed as soon as > you call gets. That's not a feature of Ruby 1.8.2 You may be describing *nix behaviour ? On Windows, it looks as if the program is hanging unless #sync of #flush is used. [What's worrying is that I can't manage to spell acccount] daz