This problem has me stopped cold. I am running a external program (nwauth) to determine if a username and password is valid (against netware nds). If a user inputs a bad username or password I want to tell them that. I also want to tell them if they have to many connections on the network (which would cause nwauth to fail even if they input a correct username and password). nwauth is placing great error information into the apache error log about what the exact problem is with their login. How to I store this error message for use during script runtime? ie I want to put a nice user friendly error message on their screen. The return variable from nwauth is just 0 or 1 - no error information. Thanks in advance for your help!!!