To all, I would appreciate any suggestions you could offer. I am moving all of our file servers from nt/novell boxes to linux(rh7.3,samba2.2.5). All has gone well, after working out the various os differences, etc., but this last one has me stumped. The clients are all win98se boxes. The main program is a protected mode dos data base frontend running in a "dos box", and all has been fine for years. There is a "trick" under novell that "hides" the data files from casual use/view by the clients, but allows the "dos.exe" full file permissions. It looks like this... \MainDir program.exe \dataDir.1 \dataDir.2 ... The clients have "read.only" permission for the program.exe, which is read over the wire and then run/excuted on the client box. All the interaction with the data is done exclusively by the the program. I can't for the life of me figure out a way to do this under linux. Cheers!...Steve~