Hi Richard and All, I use the listen utility started from etc/inittab but intead of listening all ports on 1 tty , I start listen for each port I wish to monitor, BUT redirect to just one tty con. in my case tty10. This avoids any problems with different speed ports. And as for book shops in Germany the choice of unix/ linux books in both English and German is excellant 73 richard dc/g8jvm
