Hi, There is a little confusion here. For all Bash messages you need to use echo. The only question then is where the message is to be printed. echo "Fred here" will print to stdout (or /dev/stdout). That is the default destination, so you don't have to specify it. However, if you want it to be an error message, and for it to go to standard error , e.g. echo "Error: fred here" > /dev/stderr then you have to explicitly send it to /dev/stderr. Cheers MichaelW