The mental case who picked ^J for that needs to be LARTed. Problem is, ^J is linefeed and if you happen to hit return on entering pico before it sets the terminal driver to raw mode, it'll justify the first paragraph of your file for you. If it happens to be a mail message you're replying to, then the '>' characters at the start of each line will mean the entire file is taken as one paragraph (no blank lines to mark the end of the paragraph) so you get a total mess. Yes, I understand 'J' for 'justify', but.... -tony