Hi Stefano (Bruce/Matt), Looking over your comments, I must admit I am a little confused as to what could be causing the problem. If you can invoke aquaterm complete with functioning graphics, the only difference that I can guess could exist is a difference in shell paths. The runprog program with its attendant shell variable changes seems to work fine. The AppleScript program is pretty minimalist, so the only viable explanation I can think of is somehow the shell environment getting corrupted. As the AppleScript that invokes artemis works fine here (and apparently elsewhere as well), a possible cause is the difference in startup initialization at the shell script level. Bruce, Matt, what do you think about this? If a shell is started by AppleScript, it would be a non-interactive shell, whereas if it is started manually via X11 and the default shell is bash, the startup initialization file ~/.bashrc would be read in. If it were invoked via the AppleScript program, it would not. Sounds like something is screwy with the PATH environment variable. Of course, this implies that it is something unique to Stefano's system and not general (never mind the fact that the user can switch shells -- I am using bash on one system and tcsh on another!). If a path was set incorrectly (e.g. affecting a perl library or otherwise), could this cause the symptoms that Stefano is seeing? I might add that I notice the default path for feff6 is "feff6" so this would seem to implicitly assume that feff6 is on the users path (and it obviously isn't in this case, although it is for me). One fix would be to hardwire all of the paths needed into the runprog shells script by appending to the PATH variable (e.g. the location of artemis is wired). Any suggestions? p.s. I noticed there is a dump paths option in the help menu (which is broken in that at least on my system apparently tries to dump to root and fails). I hacked the artemis.dump path to dump to /tmp/ artemis.dump and it worked, however, there is no information on the feff executable variable.