Folks:

If you need to know what recon-all and its many steps are really doing you may be interested in a doc I've just posted tabulating file create/read/write/delete for each step:

https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/ReconAllFilesVsSteps

In case you've seen my previous similar effort, this one's a considerable improvement because it's based on monitoring an actual run (bert to the rescue!), rather than on documentation.

Hope it shortens a few learning curves :-).

Graham