I'm new to this users group so please understand.. I was trying to check the archives to see if this particular problem had been previously reported but keep getting a 522 error (have tried multiple times today with same result. I only use mingw/msys to generate a compiler & runtime for GnuCOBOL (part of Gnu). The problem I am having is that there is a 'strip.exe' command at the end which is supposed to eliminate a lot of the unneeded stuff generated by gcc. Out of 300 programs (.exe .dll & .a) sent thru strip.exe - only 10 ever get changed in size amounting to a size saving of about 1% on the whole lot. Is this normal or is it standard. I appreciate you'll probably tell me to go back to GnuCOBOL people but they sent me here. The version of strip.exe is - 2.28 sized at 1,160,718 bytes. Thank you in advance & apologies. David Wall