i was pinging a host from a windows machine and made a typo which seemed harmless. the end result was it interpreted my input differently than what I had intended. thinking this was a m$ issue I quickly took the opportunity to poke fun at windows as the senior m$ admin was near by. "look at how brain dead this os is, it can't even do simple math!" He is now looking at my screen scratching his head….. "watch, i'll open a shell on os x and show you how it can add 0 +10" I open a shell on os x, same behavior as windows. " ok so apple is brain dead too, watch, it'll work on linux!" same deal… long story short, it does work as expected on all our hardware routing gear. still not sure what is happening here… osx-gwhynott:~ gwhynott$ ping 10.010.10.1 PING 10.010.10.1 (10.8.10.1): 56 data bytes gwhynott@ops:~$ ping 10.010.10.1 PING 10.010.10.1 (10.8.10.1) 56(84) bytes of data. CORE1>ping 10.010.10.1 Type escape sequence to abort. Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.10.10.1, timeout is 2 seconds: !!!!! anyone happen to know how the OS's are interpreting the 010? doesn't appear work out in base[2-10] (1010,101,22,20,14,13,12,11,10,A) thanks! greg -- This message and any attachments may contain confidential and/or privileged information for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review or distribution by anyone other than the person for whom it was originally intended is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please contact the sender and delete all copies. Opinions, conclusions or other information contained in this message may not be that of the organization.