2012-06-04 Sven Mascheck knows it all! :-) For details about the blank after the shebang, see: [0] [1] made my day. Executable programs produced by cc contain a symbol table that can be used when debugging. Once a program is working this extra information can be removed (and file space saved) using the strip command [...] [2] As I read this, it appeared completely natural to have it this day. This behavior matches the `NDEBUG' define for assert(). Debug is the default and you can disable it or remove the debug information if necessary. There should be no `--enable-debug' configure flags. [0] http://www.in- ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shebang/#blankrequired [1] http://xkcd.com/912/ [2] S.R. Bourne: ``The UNIX System'', p. 109 http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke