Thank you to all those who took the trouble to reply to my post. Further consideration convinced me that I needed an application additional to xmms to do what I ultimately wanted to do. (What I ultimately wanted to do was to be able to convert files in .wma format to .mp3 format.) That additional application was xmmsctrl and it worked to close xmms. The script I was working on is now in the following form and does do the necessary conversion: #### #!/bin/bash sed -i "s/libOSS.so/libdisk_writer.so/g" ~/.xmms/config for i in *.wma do filename=`basename "$i" .wma` echo "Converting $i to .wav" xmmsctrl launch xmms "$i" while `xmmsctrl playing`; do sleep 1 done xmmsctrl quit lame "${i/wma/wav}" "${i/wma/mp3}" && rm -f ${i/wma/wav} done sed -i "s/libdisk_writer.so/libOSS.so/g" ~/.xmms/config #### Everything of any worth in the script has been derived from others, but I'm sure that the way in which I've put those things together breaks most, if not all, the rules about correct script writing. At least the script works (for now!). Thanks again, Leslie