Hi rick:

1 Did it previously work on this exact system,
or was the system updated? Yes, It worked fine in this exact system before. Nothing about environment I know has changed.

2 What OS and version are you using? OS X 10.10.4

3 Did this stop working with an AFNI update?
If so, what was the previous version, if you know? No, I haven't update AFNI or SUMA before it stopped. And I think I should mention this, when it kept coming to this problem, I tried to update AFNI and SUMA, I deleted the AFNI and SUMA thoroughly, even the afnirc and sumarc, and installed the latest version. but this problem still came out.

4What is the current AFNI version? afni -version
Precompiled binary macosx_10.8_icc: Jul 7 2015 (Version AFNI_2011_12_21_1014)

5 What are the exact afni and suma command
that you used? " afni -niml " "suma -spec freesurfer/SUMA/sub2g_both+tlrc.spec -sv sub2g_SurfVol_at+tlrc.nii.gz &" OR what you suggest :" afni -niml -npb 3 " " suma -npb 3 -spec freesurfer/SUMA/sub2g_both+tlrc.spec -sv sub2g_SurfVol_at+tlrc.nii.gz" nothing changed.

6 What is the output from: @Quiet_Talkers -list
simple output: "searching for talking afni..."

I tried AFNI and SUMA with the same datasets on CentOS and everything worked fine.

Thanks, rick, for your patience.

Mengxing