Dear Pavel, > ... that's exactly the problem. I see, the /proc/*/fd/* objects seem "confused": are they symlinks, hardlinks, or open file descriptors? I guess should always act as the latter, where access mode flags (O_RDONLY or O_RDWR) are set at open() and not changeable afterwards in fcntl(). Any open() on them should behave as a dup(). Cheers, Paul Paul Szabo psz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/ School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Australia