If anyone has any ideas about this one, I would appreciate hearing them: My environment seems to have two variables called "COLUMNS" and "LINES" that give the size of the text console screen. I can display them from a prompt with echo $COLUMNS and echo $LINES and their values seem correct. I don't have the foggiest notion of who set them, it wasn't me. However, in a C program which could really benefit from knowing those values, the "getenv" function cannot find them. It returns NULL for each variable, caps and quotes are correctly given, and the same function "getenv" retrieves other environment variables just fine. How come my program can't locate COLUMNS and LINES in the environment? Chuck -- The Moon is Waxing Crescent (16% of Full) Home page at http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh Speakfreely address 24.105.197.112:2074