Hi, The now-familiar find diagnostic "... changed during execution" has long been a source of mild curiosity to me. But with the recent brouhaha here, I decided to look into the actual issue at hand, so I installed the source for the 4.1.7 version of the "findutils" package (from my SuSE 9.1 Professional distribution). There are four places in the source code of find at which that diagnostic can be issued. In three of them, it is a change in either the device number of inode number of a directory being examined by find that triggers the (fatal) diagnostic. Two of those three pertain solely to the top-level directory (a find search root, either '.', the default, or one of the initial "path" arguments). With this in mind, the real cause of this diagnostic can be easily seen without the use of find at all: % cd /media # Print the device number and inode % stat -c '%d %i' dvd 14 1949 % stat -c '%d %i' dvd 14 1949 % ls -l dvd >/dev/null % stat -c '%d %i' dvd 5696 59392 % stat -c '%d %i' dvd 14 1949 My guess is that this behavior is a subfs / automounter issue. In fact, if I run "ls -l dvd" and follow it quickly by several invocations of "stat -c '%d %i'" I'll see the "5696 59392" numbers for a second or so and then it quickly reverts to "14 1949". % cd /media % alias sd='stat -c "%d %i" dvd' % alias ld='ls -l dvd >/dev/null' % sd; sd; sd; ld; sd; sleep 1; sd; sleep 1; sd; sleep 1; sd; sleep 1; sd; sleep 1; sd; sleep 1; sd; 14 1949 14 1949 14 1949 5696 59392 5696 59392 5696 59392 14 1949 14 1949 14 1949 14 1949 So now we all know, right? Find is telling the truth. The mount-point directory does change both its device number and inode number when the removable media device that gets mounted there is automatically mounted and unmounted by the automounter. OK? Randall Schulz