I'm a bit puzzled, but then I only ever worked with some version of Ultrix and an AT&T flavour of UNIX in Philips, SCO 3.2V4.2 (OpenServer 3ish), DEC Digital UNIX, Tru64, HP-UX 1123/11.31 and only ever used "mkdir -p". Some differences in the various versions are easily solved in scripts, like shown below. Not the best of examples, but easy. Getting it to work on a linux flavour wouldn't be too difficult :-) OS_TYPE=`uname -n` case "${OS_TYPE}" in "OSF1") PATH=".:/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/xyz/shell:/xyz/appl/unix/bin:/xyz/utils:" TZ="THA-7" ;; "HP-UX") PATH=".:/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/contrib/bin:/xyz/field/scripts:/xyz/shell:/xyz/appl/unix/bin:/xyz/utils:" TZ="TST-7" ;; *) echo "${OS_TYPE} unknown, exit" exit 1 ;; esac