well well well :oops: I'm very sorry. Of course, as you guessed, it was DD/MM/YY VMS 8.3 Alpha Now, considering the CPU time used with good old DCL and my Charon emulator :-) I've better code that in Fortran as the file is 220 000 records big ! Thanks to all Merci Hein, ca vax :-) I'll post another question for the gurus now. Bye, DTL