I figured out what my problem was. There appear to be some "safeguards" when compiling under HP-UX that don't exist under linux... for e.g. the problem with strcmp was that, under certain circumstances, it was running with one argument null which wasn't a problem under HP-UX but, apparently, was under linux. I guess my code was a little shoddy :( It just occured to me also that my original post may have been somewhat off-topic. Sorry about that. DvB
