Just a dumb question here... What ever hapend to the K&R field operators? Why does everyone go to all the work of making up bit manipulation macros when the language supports small integer values in native syntax? Chris Fedde uswmrg2!chrisf at uswat.uswest.com -- _ ___ / ' /_ _ . /_ _ _/ _/ _ \__/ /_/(/_/)_ / (/_(/_(/_(/_