In article <Pine.LNX.4.33.0212092317410.8611-100000 / eli.fsl.noaa.gov>, ahoward wrote: > i have gotten around this problem by spawning another process using > the unix at command with a time of 'now' Neat trick! OK, I have implemented it and it will do for now. But it's not ideal: I would really like the spawned process's stdin, stdout and stderr to be the same as the original. Which AFAIK means I would have to fork. But thanks anyway. Jeremy Henty