Never guessed that creating a routine to check whether a file exists would be such a hassle. Should have taken 10 minutes, but took a day. None of the 'file' objects in Max has such a function, except perhaps the filemanager object, but the workings of that one are quite mysterious. There is no reference doc, no settings in the inspector other than the basics, no info in the sidebar, and the help file does not list an 'exist' function. I wrestled with putting a java class pulled from the web into an mxj object, but gave up after an hour of failures. At the end of the day, still nothing. I dropped it from my mind. That usually helps a lot in situations like that. And indeed, later that night, I had a vision, which I hereby attach for the good of all. Hope it saves you some time.