I am new to Ruby and RoR, so pardon me if I ask naive questions. Ruby on Windows just does not feel right to me. Primarily, I develop in Linux, mostly in Fedora. Though, I have Ubuntu installed on some machines as well. I do get stuck in Linux too, mostly due to my lack of knowledge and experience with Ruby and RoR, but have much better batting average finding my way around the problems. I have a dual boot machine with Windows and Fedora. So I decided to go through the "Programming Ruby" book on the Windows side just for the heck of it -- I keep running into problems that I have no idea how to fix. Here is another one: This is a little program out of the PickAxe book (2nd Edition) on page 108. opfile_name = "C:\\RubyPrograms\\PickAxeBook\\testfile" socket = $stdin op_file = File.open(opfile_name, "w") begin # Exceptions raised by this code will # be caught by the following rescue clause while data = socket.read(512) op_file.write(data) end rescue SystemCallError $stderr.print "IO failed: " + $! op_file.close File.delete(opfile_name) raise end When I run it, a nice little DOS window opens up with C:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe it its title bar and the cursor just waits. I cannot type, cannot CNTRL-C, except close it by clicking on the top right hand corner X box. When I do, ruby quits with the following message: >ruby ex0261.rb >Exit code: -1073741510 How does one go about debugging this? I can't even tell which line of the code the program is hung-up at? I can see that windows/ruby is creating the testfile in the directory which has zero bytes. I thought that the line socket = $stdin assigns standard input to this input stream which we call socket. Therefore, am I not supposed to be able to type into the Waiting DOS window that opens up? Is this not the Standard Input? I haven't tried to run this in Linux yet, but something tells me that I am better off in that environment? May be my lack of experience/knowledge? Please advise. Bharat -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.