Hi Jason, "." represents the current working directory and ".." represents the parent directory of the current working directory . It is useful in various contexts. For example if u r currently in the directory /mnt/foo and want to copy the content of /mnt/foo1 to /mnt/foo just isuue the command " cp -R /mnt/foo1/* . " .So it is always good to represent the working directory with a short symbol and it is not at all a waste.... Manu -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/