Another way to be portable is to have per-system files to set up some environment variables and then uniform portable files that use them. You can do that same thing *within* a file by writing conditionals or a case on the result of uname. It's probably best to segregate per-system stuff in a well-contained file or section of a file in this way ... Regards -- Eliot Moss -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple