Thanks ammo for the brush up on char (and cleaning up my muddled explanation), I have been rather happy to leave that mess behind (at least with the string manipulation) with a move over to perl and the like

One question though:

You mention the danger of using strcpy (which I understand where you are coming from), but if you are just assigning a pointer to a predefined/preset string, which is what I did, do you still have an issue with a possible buffer overflow (maybe their is an internal limit to the amount of chars/size of array that is inherent when compiled? is that what you mean?). To continue the question, say you took input (which is where the danger can arise) and assigned it to a * char, once again would assigning the pointer to the pointer be a problem or would the S already have hit the F, on the input (so long as there were no further modifications to the array of chars, such as allowing reinput (which I can quite obviously see as an issue))...

Thanks in advance,

Nebulus