Tim Newsham: I'm not sure what fd 3 is intended to be, but its the telnet socket in p9p. ==== By the 10/e days, file descriptor 3 was /dev/tty. There was no more magic driver for /dev/tty; the special file still existed, but it was a link to /dev/fd/3. Similarly /dev/stdin stdout stderr were links to /dev/fd/0 1 2. (I mean real links, not mere symbolic ones.) I have a vague recollection that early on /dev/tty was fd/127 instead, but that changed somewhere in the middle 8/e era. None of which says what Plan 9 did with that file descriptor, though I suppose it could possibly have copied the /dev/tty use. And none of that excuses the hard-coded magic number file descriptor, but hackers will be hackers. Norman Wilson Toronto ON