Colin wonders: How do you set your environment so that you can run a particular program such as acrobat, from any current working directory? Add the basename of the path to the binary to your $PATH environment variable. If Acrobat Reader is /usr/local/Acrobat4/bin/acroread (as it is on my system), do this: $ export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/Acrobat4/bin" You might also want to edit ~/.bashrc if you don't want to run this command by hand every time you log in. If you are using tcsh, it's similar: % setenv PATH $PATH:/usr/local/Acrobat4/bin ...and then edit ~/.tcshrc. In addition how can you assign a particular file format a default reader? This varies by application. There is no read_file(1) command or anything like that (although you could create one with not too much trouble), so you can't do it from a text shell. Programs like gmc and konqueror have their own mechanisms for configuration which I won't go into here because they are relatively easy to figure out (look around in the Preferences dialog). -- Chris www.innerfireworks.com How can you say this is not Eden?