Is there any reason why can't open do an exclusive open? Of course that's possible with sysopen and O_EXCL, but that's plain ugly and hard to explain to newcomers. I'm having the impression that the only reason we don't have it is that stdio doesn't have it, which is not a particularly good reason anymore IMNSHO. Is there anything opposed to adding something like «open my $fh, '>!', $filename»? LeonThread Next