Thanks! That works. BTW, is there any way to tell what OS that Ruby is currently running on? (as opposed to what it was built on). ie. can I tell if the box I'm running on is WinNT, Win98, Win2000 or Win95? The methods presented only show where it was built (which is of course what I asked for) and in the case of the various Win's the return string will always be the same. I suppose that after I've determined that it is some kind of Windows platfrom I could then run `system ver` and check the result. Phil