Zefram, Yes, it is unclear whether your suggestion about executables would work, but I'll probably not try. My provider gives good support despite the pittance I pay them, and I don't want to upset them. I'm assuming their reasoning is that allowing users to run 'unknown' executables could potentially crash their server, disadvantaging unrelated users sharing that server, and I think that's a reasonable restriction in the circumstances. Thanks for the correction regarding cp versus cat (showing my Linux ignorance). I misunderstood one of the Linux references I read, where it showed multiple files being copied with cp. I now understand that simply copies all the source files *individually* to a destination directory, not concatenating them. So 'cat' it is! Regards, Daniel