Oh, right you are. Thanks for catching my mistake! (I don't have anything like the same familiarity with V7 as I do with V6; never did any system hacking on the former.) Now that you mention it, I do seem to remember this kludge; IIRC, a later Unix paper described the V7 inode layout. I never looked at the actual code, though. Now that I do, it looks like iexpand() (in iget.c) is not exactly portable! On a machine with a different byte order for the bytes within a long, that ain't gonna work... Noel