dear friends, i am rewriting this because my earlier post misses some information, and includes the post from other people. due to some unknown reason, i cant invoke gcc from my account. its not really troublling the machine, but if I invoke gcc/g++/ifort to compile any program(though gfortran is working fine), its not doing anything. gcc is specially making the terminal inactive. here is ps -aux output of gcc -v. Rudra 10102 0.0 0.0 1776 400 pts/1 S+ 10:43 0:00 gcc -v my system is : Linux xxx.lan.yyy.res.in 2.6.23.1-42.fc8 #1 SMP Tue Oct 30 13:55:12 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux can yoou tell me what is going wrong? my gcc version 4.1.2 20070925 -- Rudra JRF; SNBNCBS http://www.bose.res.in/~rudra A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk I have a work station. Please, if possible, don't send me MS Word or PowerPoint attachments Why?See: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html From Chandigarh to Chennai - find friends all over India. Go to http://in.promos.yahoo.com/groups/citygroups/