Noel Chiappa: In the earliest systems, e.g. that on the PDP-7, the change-directory command was just `ch'. Two vague memories about the change: -- Dennis, in one of his retrospective papers (possibly that in the 1984 all-UNIX BLTJ issue, but I don't have it handy at the moment) remarked about ch becoming chdir but couldn't remember why that happened. -- Someone else, possibly Tom Duff, once suggested to me that in the earliest systems, the working directory was the only thing that could be changed: no chown, no chmod. Hence just ch for chdir. I don't know offhand whether that's true, but it makes a good story. Personally I'd rather have to type chdir and leav off th trailing e on many other words than creat if it let me off dealing with pieces of key system infrastructure that insist on printing colour-change ANSI escape sequences (with, so far as I can tell, no way to disable them) and give important files names beginning with - so that grep pattern * produces an error. But that happens in Linux, not UNIX. Norman Wilson Toronto ON