Here's an esoteric question for those of you wanting a challenge. How can I turn an arbitrary non-networked bash script into a server? Okay, I'll head a followup question off at the pass... "why would I want to do something insane like turning a bash script into a network server?" The answer is "because". Really, there's no reason other than I want to :-P Now netcat handily has the exact option that I need: -e. With that, I could do something like: while 1; do netcat -l -p 16789 -e myscript.sh; done Alas, the netcat people are reasonable and security conscious folk so they prudently refuse to enable the -e option by default. In fact, to get that functionality, you must recompile netcat with the -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE compile flag! I love it :) But that doesn't help me because the solution that *I* want would require only software that I can reasonably assume would already be on any Linux system (no compiling!). I suppose I could write a couple line perl script to handle the incoming connections... but it seems sacrilegious for a shell script to require perl. Plus, not all Linux systems have perl. [x]inted would certainly fit the bill but using that requires root access so that's out. Am I out of luck, here? Or is there some commonly available utility out there that can open up a socket for me? Kurt