David Douthitt writes: ... Sorry for bothering you, but to prevent you from re-inventing the wheel again, there is a package 'filelock' in the contrib directory in ftp://ftp.netlab.co.jp/pub/lang/ruby/contrib/filelock.rb. Perhaps it is what you have searched? But then, nobody has told me if you like to re-invent the wheel again ;-) ... But, however, let me tell you that I would not derive Lock from File. You indicate so, that a lockfile is a normal file in first case. All methods of File would be available to data handling. Is it that what you intend? Methods like: write, path, print, size, ... > * Lock.new insisted on 1 parameter - but initialize method had NO parameters Because File.new wants to have a parameter. So Lock.new should also accept one. The simplest would be to define: def Lock.new(*dummy) ... end BUT you have a problem here. File.new is one of the constructors, that *DO*NOT* call initialize afterwards. So your Lock#initialize didn't get called!!! ... Let the other problems remaining ... :-) > Thanks for all the help! > > \cle -- Clemens Hintze mailto: c.hintze / gmx.net