After a day and an evening of fighting with modern hardware, the modern tangle that passes for UNIX nowadays, and modern e-merchandising, I am too lazy to go look up the details. But as I remember it, two syncs was indeed probably enough. I believe that when sync(2) returned, all unflushed I/O had been queued to the device driver, but not necessarily finished, so the second sync was just a time-filling no-op. If all the disks were in view, it probably sufficed just to watch them until all the lights (little incandescent bulbs in those days, not LEDs) had stopped blinking. I usually typed sync three or four times myself. It gave me a comfortable feeling (the opposite of a syncing feeling, I suppose). I still occasionally type `sync' to the shell as a sort of comfort word while thinking about what I'm going to do next. Old habits die hard. (sync; sync; sync) Norman Wilson Toronto ON