Ach! It should come as no surprise that Mr. Nordstrom is absolutely correct in all regards. My "echo" shell built-in doesn't support the "-n". If you also have this problem, try using "printf", eg. # printf "<username>:<realm>:<password> | md5sum | cut -d\ -f1 to generate the hashed password. Mr. Nordstrom is also correct on the formatting of the digest password file. Either of the following work: <username>:<md5-hash> <username>:<realm>:<md5-hash> which means that the output from "htdigest" will work as-is. I was supplying the parameters to "htdigest" in the wrong order. I apologize for sowing confusion! Back to the topic: ldap_digest_auth: I use the "iplanetReversiblePassword" attribute to store the realm & password hash, eg. iplanetReversiblePassword: <realm>:<md5-hash> the hash can be the one generated with the previous command or the htdigest. I use the following to harvest this from LDAP (yes, this is an older style LDAP tree, but it works equally well under the newer tree schemes): auth_param digest program /opt/webproxy/squid3.0.5/libexec/digest_ldap_auth -b "ou=nsPeople,o=<domain>,c=us" -u "uid" -A "iplanetReversiblePassword" -e -v 3 -h localhost Many thanks to Mr. Nordstrom for keeping me straight! Regards, Chris