hi frank i'm not a bash expert either: it took me 2 hours to come up with the following enter the following 6 lines of code in a file called test #!/bin/sh if [ $1 = $2 ]; then echo "ok" else echo "oops" fi next, chmod 777 test then try it: ./test 1 1 and ./test 1 2 now go back and change the = to == and try it and you get ./test: [: ==: binary operator expected oops note: bash is from slakware 3.5 thanks russ