So, in: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/s2/mv.c what's the point of this piece of code: p = place; p1 = p; while(*p++ = *argp3++); p2 = p; while(*p++ = *argp4++); execl("/bin/cp","cp", p1, p2, 0); I mean, I get that it's copying the two strings pointed to by 'argp3' and 'argp4' into a temporary buffer at 'place', and leaving 'p1' and 'p2' as pointers to the copies of said strings, but... why is it doing that? I at first thought that maybe the execl() call was smashing the stack (and thus the copies pointed to by 'argp3' and 'argp4'), or something, but I don't think it does that. So why couldn't the code have just been: execl("/bin/cp","cp", argp3, argp4, 0); Is this code maybe just a left-over from some previous variant? Noel