Rich,
Hrm. OK, there's one more thing that my script does that is different from running it interactively. In a cron job, I don't want fractint outputting all the status updates "Writing line 1", etc., so I close stdin, stdout and stderr using sh(1) notation:
bin/xfractint -disk -geometry ${render_width}x${render_height} \ batch=yes savename=tmp.gif "@tmp.par/tmp" >&- 1>&- <&-
When I attempt to render The_Bug-Eyed_Tree with stdin closed, it fails right away with exit status 2, regardless of the parameter set name ("The_Bug-Eyed_Tree" or "tmp").
Okay, that helps. Running an sh shell and using the above redirection, I also get an immediate exit of xfractint. You should have a file named stopmsg.txt in your working directory. This file gives a clue about what is happening. When you run xfractint in batch mode, you'll notice that if you press a key other than <TAB> or <F1>, you immediately exit. This appears to be what is happening. The <&- redirection is somehow passing keystrokes back to xfractint. I'll look into why the keystrokes aren't just ignored in batch mode. I would expect <TAB>, <F1>, and <ESC> (then <Y>) to be functional, but nothing else. Jonathan