Ferhat, your note is very funny indeed but does not have much useful suggestions in it. I'm the one who wrote the line monitor and I believe I know VM pretty well. The reason it monitors records and not bytes is that this is the only information that is available. With VM/SP 5 or VM/XA, you have access to the number of disk blocks of a spool file from a new field in the first spool block. To read that field the file must not be already opened and you must own it; neither conditions holds true in the case of RSCS. With RSCS V2.2 and the aforesaid levels of VM, the block count is provided in some of the messages, but not all. Note that this block count is still not an indication of the time it takes to transfer the file, because a file containing records of, say, 132 times the same character would take very little time to transfer (because of data compression). So, it is true that monitoring on the number of records is stupid. Unfortunately this is the best that we can do, and it is definitely better than nothing: in practice, there are *not many* 50,000 records files that contain only 3 characters per line, and *a lot* of them containing FORTRAN programs. The 5-10 users in the world who like to send 50,000 records of 3 characters will just have to wait, and I think that's better than making tens of thousands of people wait for their mail because large files are being sent. Eric