Jim - I did the CVS update and that solved most of the problems. The only remaining problem is that /proc/speakup/punc_all seems to have permissions of 444 instead of 666 like the other punctuation lists (punc_most and punc_some) and I am unable to change those permissions with chmod - no error reported, it looks like it worked, but it remains 444. So for now I am omitting punc_all from my source directory. The other files with backslashes work fine now - caps_start and caps_stop. Chuck My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh The Moon is Waning Gibbous (54% of Full)