hate replying to myself, but there was a bug in the short peace of shell code. it should read: [snip] Then do something like: find /usr/local/stow/openldap-2.0.23 -type f | while read f; do find /usr/local -name `basename $f` #<<< done | grep -v /usr/local/stow/openldap-2.0.23 > openldap-files.list [snip] cheers. dejan