colin> So it would appear that the Debian version of g77 does not colin> have the 72 char colin> limit. Indeed, I cannot reproduce that on this Suse-10 system, if it fails wth gfortran, and it also fails with g77. I copied your print statement, with print starting in column 12, thus the closing single-quote is in 73, then just an 'end' after for a 2-line program 1 print *, 'Try one of "Skip", "Test", "Verbosity" or "Cleanup"' 2 end Both g77 and gfortran choke on it when not using any -ffree-form or -ffixed-line-length= flags, and work if using the flag. Did debain patch it so that it does not behave as documented? are the documents patched too?!? I've got debian (lenny/sid) at home I can try later on -- but probably I'm not going to be doing any fortran on that machine. (Also the editor I'm using (vim) handily places a nasty-looking yellow blob over the offending quote when it's beyond the 72 columns!) Versions: GNU Fortran (GCC) 3.3.5 20050117 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux) GNU Fortran 95 (GCC 4.0.2 20050901 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) GNU Fortran 95 (GCC) 4.2.0 20070130 (prerelease) <- my own build Robert