Hi, I wasted a whole afternoon figuring out why a job that runs ok on many opensuse machines fails on a machine that runs a debian alpha distribution (customer demand). I already had to fix all kind of startup scripts due to the fact that sh(ell scripts) are run with dash which is incompatible so maybe I should have be more suspicious towards the os instead of trying to fix the tex end. Anyhow, one thing I noticed is that setuptex doesn't seem to work ok i.e. there is something wrong with determining $OWNPATH which makes the initialization fail. Maybe some volunteer can figure that out (there are some catches for other shells in the script too so adding yet another doesn't hurt). But, the biggest surprise (if I got it right) is that in some of the scripts that I use and run from within context, the to be produced results sometimes were there and sometimes not. This got obscured by the fact that in a second run the content actually was there (it has to be fetched from a remote database) but that code like "page \pagenumber\ of \lastpage" failed to report the right last page which in fact was a side effect of the first run not using content. Okay, it got somewhat more obscured by the fact that I used --runs=2 Accidentally, by adding more tracing code, I figured out is that I pipe the messages to a log file using &> which is pretty valid in bash but not so in dash where the & puts the job in the background and thereby let the tex run carry on without waiting. So, it looks like we need to use >filename 2>&1 instead of &>filename. I checked the scripts in the context tree and so far found no occurences but first-setup.sh has two &>'s in it that might need fixing. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------