Help!

I'm trying to get a semaphore but the semget call dies within the 
call and results in 

Bad system call

here is the code segment which causes the problem:

if((SemID = semget(IPC_PRIVATE, 1, 0777)) < 0)
	{
	...... just error handling
	}

It doesn't even come to return the value to the SemID variable.

Does anyone have any idea why this happens or a workaround ??

Kind regards

Harald