First, I sent a request, suspend appears to be working fine, but suspendoff is not. I sent in a 1 day request, then if I rename the file, changing from su01262252..... to su01242252....., wouldn't that make it appear to have been done 2 days earlier, so that if suspendoff is run, it should catch it since it is expired? It is not working. I don't see a lock that may be stopping it (and it's only a test list - no one is using it except me). How do I troubleshoot this to find out where it's going wrong? Secondly, suspend only stores the email addy and days - it loses any bracketed comments that may be in the dist file after the email addy, such as email@here.com (Firstname Lastname State) As near as I can tell, it finds the line in DIST holding the address, but does not grab anything back from the line. Is anyone game to rewrite it to retain any comments? I do not have enough knowledge of shell. As a last resort I will go the perl route, but this seems to be so much more efficient. Jo Shea, Mamma Roo http://kanggah.com