How about this instead? It actually changes the behaviour slightly. Currently a /etc/hostname which contains the single character '\n' would return inspect_get_hostname = "" (which seems wrong). This is the default /etc/hostname for virt-builder images. I think this is because in the current code, read_small_file actually returns “Some [""; ""]”, so it takes the branch where it matches “| Some (hostname :: _)” which returns empty string. Anyway, after this patch it returns "unknown" which is documented as "the hostname could not be determined", which I think is more correct behaviour. I tested it also on files with blank lines and comments and so on, and it seems to do what is necessary, although it could do with a proper regression test. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html