On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 03:27:49PM -0800, Olwe Bottorff wrote: > Thanks a lot, Nate. I'll just have to familiarize > myself with what strace is doing. Somehow the shell > looks like it's doing a little bit more than your > typical Unix Programming pipes demo program. Or is > strace always so "thorough." strace is very thorough. It prints out every system call a program makes. You can quiet it down with the -e options. Check out the man page for details. Nate