Thanks, Mick. On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:08 PM, Michael Graham wrote: > (Sorry Dave I keep hitting reply and not reply to list) Yes, I keep doing that :) > External helps are not supposed to exit once they have completed a > request. Your perl script should read from stdin then write OK/ERR then > wait for more input. Ah! So this should work? 1:#!/usr/bin/perl 2:while(1){ 3: $| = 1; 4: $ip=<STDIN>; 5: $ip=chomp($ip); 6: $ipfile='/var/www/apache2-default/cgi-bin/ips/'.$ip; 7: #print $ipfile; 8: if (-e $ipfile){print "OK";} 9: else {print "ERR : ".$ip;} 10:} I'll try it right now.