[my readline woes snipped] Michael> Hmm. Does compiling a proggie Michael> $ gcc foo.c -lreadline Michael> work? It doesn't here if I move libreadline.so & libreadline.a Michael> out of the way. Yup, it does: beluga:tmp% cc -o foo foo.c -lreadline -ltermcap beluga:tmp% ./foo >>sdfsdfsdf sdfsdfsdf (This after deleting both /lib/libreadline.so and /lib/libhistory.so.) In this case, foo.c is #include <stdio.h> #include <readline/readline.h> #include <readline/history.h> main() { printf("%s\n", readline(">>" )); } Michael> Do you need a readline-devel package or something? Got that. I just noticed that "rpm -q --whatprovides /lib/libreadline.so" does list readline-devel as the provider. I just reinstalled it using --force. Now the .so symlinks are there. Go figure... Oh well, probably ought to drop it unless another Mandrake user complains. I'm really amazed at how many packages Mandrake chose *not* to install even though I selected all the groups during install and was installing into fresh / and /usr partitions. I've been dribbling various packages in bit-by-bit as I've discovered omissions. In the past I've also noticed files apparently not installed even though the packages that were supposed to provide them were installed. Skip