A typical way to do it is to give one or both of the programs ILU interfaces, and use ILU to do the IPC. Information on ILU is available at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html; a Python tutorial for ILU is at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/misc/tutpython.html. Bill