RE: [Zope] 'popen' calls not happening?

yes, but where are you returning the value of 'errors'?

The external method ends with:: return dongles, errors, success, secfeko and that is displayed to screen in a subsequent DTML method. It has successfully displayed exceptions when they occurred, but it isn't displaying any now.

No exception is being raised because you are catching the exception.

Hmm, as I understand it, *if* an exception was being raised, I would be assigning its details to 'errors'. Stepping thru the code in pdb, however, shows that the assignment to 'errors' never happens --- the 'except' suite is not being executed. I've also tried without wrapping the popen3 call in a 'try', same thing (the textfile doesn't get written) .. Jean