Not having enough space on th AAO I took the quick approach (?) and after a couple of hiccups I got Damians approach to work - the error messages from the compiler go to std error, so ..

mcs $* 2>&1 | sed 's/(([0-9]*),[0-9]*)/:\1/';

did the trick. Thanks guys for your help, must get round to the SVN version next ...

bw. Geoff ###########################################This message has been scanned by F-Secure Anti-Virus for Microsoft Exchange.Formore information, connect to http://www.F-Secure.com/