Well, I got a list of perm's for stuff in /dev (from a sarge system. I'm on etch). There were only two diff's: two sound devices. But there are lots of insane permissions throughout the rest of the system. Is this because when I did 'chmod -R 777 /dev' I also in effect did 'chmod -R 777 /dev/hda1'? But when I do 'ls -R /dev/hda1' I get only '/dev/hda1'. Why the diff' in the scope of the commands? And where do you read about this kind of thing? Thanks, tom