note flexvault <a href="http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=946673">mascip</a>, Not knowing your environment, these suggestion are just guesstimates. I usually work on *nix, so I opened a XP laptop to verify this will work, and it did. so here goes. I opened two command windows (cmd.exe) on the XP, ran Vim in one, and executed the edited Perl script in the other. I could edit with Vim and could interact with the running script by just switching windows. For my *nix environments, I run 5 x-windows by default. 3 x-windows are used for Perl programming: <ul><li> #1 for editing the Perl script <li> #2 for execution the Perl script <li> #3 for checking results of the Perl script, such as log files, etc. </ul> The other 2 windows are used for doing system admin functions as needed. This way I can be interrupted for an emergency, and when things are fixed, I can go back to programming without missing a beat. This may not be a solution to your problem, but it may help. Good Luck! <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-733061"> "Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin </div></div> 982789 982789