We show that permanent optical waveguides can be formed in various bulk glasses by photoinduced refractive index change with an ultrashort pulse laser. The waveguides were fabricated by focusing the laser beam through an microscope objective and translating the sample parallel to the axis of the laser beam. From the observations of intensity distributions in the output of guided light by a CCD camera, we demonstrated that permanent optical waveguides can be successfully formed in various glasses. In addition, from the analysis of a near-field pattern, it was confirmed that single mode waveguides of the graded index type can be formed by a writing technique using the ultrashort pulse laser. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.