"Silva, Russell" wrote: > x=`/usr/bin/cat < temp`;
I don't know what is causing your problem. I ran your testcase several times and never saw a failure, but from your description it seems like it's the kind of thing that might occur very rarely. My only suggestion is that if your true desire is to actually read the contents of a file into a variable, then the above construct is a fairly expensive way of doing it. This requires a fork/exec (an operation which is extremely slow under cygwin) of /bin/cat, whose purpose is only to read from one fd and write to another. If you can live with a bash-specific (?) construct, then x=$(< temp) should cause the same effect but much more efficiently, as the shell itself just reads the file without invoking any subprocesses. Brian -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/