One idea he floated was to save space by dumping the *shell* and rewriting all the shell scripts as Perl scripts... imagine having to track down all the scripts on the boot floppy plus all the package install scripts and rewrite them to not require any shell. Imagine trying to patch up after a failed boot without any shell... [I've never seen an interactive perl provide an environment as comfortable as the shell.] Raul D. Miller <rockwell@nova.umd.edu>