Thanks, Dave. Actually I've tried it with the sb and related commands and with minicom. Obviously, I'm leaving something out or doing things in the wrong order, or maybe there's a setting on the braillelite that has to be changed. The braillelite gets to the point where it says "start the transfer" and "sb" if I'm trying to send seems to work, but then the braillelite says "error transferring abort" or something close to that. I know this is doable and I'm just missing something really obvious, so guess I'll take it up again tomorrow. -- Cheryl