SORRY everyone, posted to wrong list I'm writing customer orders into a file. I'm 1. getting data from session variables and a database, 2. putting it into a variable called $fileContent 3. then touch($filename); 4. then writing $fileContent to $filename - the code is at the bottom The test versions of this have all gone well. The file must contain the data in a preset format. All the data is on one line (no line breaks) and each field has a preset limit, The file is FTPed and the data parsed. So far so good. It works with one customer order Now when I want to write multiple customer orders it doesn't work? Abbreviated code is below // CODE FOR MULTIPLE ORDERS while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result )) { $theItemID=$row["orderedItems.itemID"]; $theItemPrice=$row["itemPrice"]; $theItemQty=$row["itemQty"]; $thisItemID= sprintf("% 6d",$theItemID); $thisItemPrice= sprintf("%7.2f",$theItemPrice); $thisItemQty= sprintf("% 7d",$theItemQty); $moreContent= "\n" . "20" . $thisOrder . $thisItemID . $thisItemPrice . $thisItemQty . "\n"; } //END CODE // CODE BELOW IS FOR WRITE TO FILE // Make sure the file exists and is writable first. if (is_writable($filename)) { // Open $filename in write mode. if (!$handle = fopen($filename, 'w')) { echo "Cannot open file ($filename)"; exit; } // Write $fileContent to opened file. if (fwrite($handle, $fileContent) === FALSE) { echo "Cannot write to file ($filename)"; exit; } fclose($handle);