My slow 386 is much more likely to have an error reading a floppy when floppy_merge runs to the pipe and file extraction happens in parallel with floppy reading then when I direct the output of floppy_merge to a file and extract it later. I don't know why. Bruce -- "Excusing bad programming is a shooting offense, no matter _what_ the circumstances". - Linus Torvalds, to the linux-kernel mailing list. "I will no longer make excuses for Linus". - Bruce Perens