Hi, I was berating an AT&Ter at an ACCU conference a long time ago. I said that "ls" was an example of Unix's unhelpfulness. When he told me that "ls" was short for "list sorted", I remembered it to this day. Had a look at your man page for ls - it states:- List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default). Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort. Do you think it would be a worthwhile thing to let people know directly that ls is short for "list sorted"? TTFN, Ian -- ACCU - Professionalism in programming - http://www.accu.org/