hello, i finally translated the ruby script into perl, and here it is: #!/usr/bin/perl -w if (@ARGV == 2) { $file="/etc/exim4/passwd"; open(PWD,">>$file") || die("Couldn't append to file '$file': $!"); print PWD $ARGV[0] . ":" . crypt($ARGV[1], q{$1$.}) . "\n"; close(PWD); } else { die ("Syntax: $0 username passwd \n"); } bye jonas