sorry, must have missed the original question; if you set the environment variables LANG and LC_COLLATE to either 'C' or 'POSIX' you should be ok. Gertjan -- Gertjan van Noord Alfa-informatica, RUG, Postbus 716, 9700 AS Groningen vannoord at let dot rug dot nl http://www.let.rug.nl/~vannoord