Thank you very much for the update. I have already changed my code to use a shared file(s). Neverthless, after reading your comments - I can see exactly where my original design was wrong. I get it now. Thank you very much - this will be invaluable in other areas where I need to alter pipe processing connections.

Hi Hans. I have been writing an application for a few years now .. www.tenfiftytwo.co.uk/pipelines It's basically a multi-stream pipelines (textual manipulation) app that will allow you to chain together pipelines to transform text/data. I am developing a TRACE option that allows interactive user input to inspect i/o records and in order to do this each called process must share the same console. So, console prompts must be just that - no redirection back to the calling process. They need to be console only. Only the called process output should be captured by re-directed streams. Best regards. James. PS. Cannot believe that I did not think of CreateFile() .. thanks again.