I found a funny bug in the djgpp distribution of ruby: print "\032\n" produces in `write': No space left on drive (ENOSPC) (Errno::ENOSPC) (funny but annoying: it prevents copying a file containing the above pattern. Since it involves ^Z I expect this bug to be specific to this distribution of ruby, though I did not try) On another topic, is there a way in ruby to have a string behave as a file (something like the 'istringstrem' class of C++ ?) Best regards, Jean MICHEL