Okay, I am aware of http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_unix_tools which gives some implementation of simple unix utilities in haskell. But I couldn't figure out how to use them directly from the shell, and of course that's what most readers will probably wnat. Or let me put it another way. Is there a way to do find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs du | perl -ane 'print "\$F[0]\n"' | perl -e '$sum += $_ while <>; print "$sum\n"' as a shell command that idiomatically uses haskell? For non-perlers, that sums up the disk usage of all files in the current directory, skipping subdirs. print "\$F[0]\n looks at the first (space delimited) collumn of output. perl -e '$sum += $_ while <>; print "$sum\n"' , which is I guess the meat of the program, sums up all the numbers spewed out of the first column, so in the end you get a total. So, anyone out there want to establish a haskell one liner tradition? :) thomas.