Hi Folks, I was dusting my old copy of Kernighan & Pike, and I remembered working out most of the examples on an antiquated unix machine in engineering school. I decided to try out some just for kicks, and I discovered something: In page 51 of K&P, there's an example that runs od on a directory, and the dump actually shows the filenames. I tried doing that (running 'od .' ) on my linux box, and got this instead: od: .: Is a directory 0000000 So why doesn't od work on directories? Could somebody shed some light on this, please! Thanks in Advance, Karthik. -- There are things known and things unknown, in between lie the Doors -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/