So, speaking of system calls that are missing in earlier versions of Unix, that tickled a memory: When I got tar running on my V6, I didn't know about this, and I took a V7 tar and got it running myself, see here: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/ImprovingV6.html#tar One thing I found out while doing that is that tar uses the 'utime' system call on V7 to set the file date, but i) V6 doesn't have utime() (although it has smdate(), albeit commented out in the standard distro), and ii) on now looking in src/cmd/tar and src/libc/v6 in the V7 distro, I don't see a replacement version of utime(). As near as I can make out, 'v6tar' must be using the standard V7 version of utime(), which I assume turns into a call to nosys() on V6 (returns an error); tar doesn't check the return value, so the call fails (silently). So v6tar won't correctly set the file date when moving a file _to_ V6. Noel