Hello, There is also a problem in the grep expression: some old installations of Debian, event when upgraded to Lenny, still have 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 linux etc. in their /etc/inittab, so that grep 'tty[0-9]*$' fails to find anything. grep -e '\<tty[0-9]*\>' should be fine instead. Samuel