\_ > This works well. David's one liner is probably better because I'm \_ > manipulating 60+MB files and I don't really want the whole thing in one \_ > var :). \_ \_ I'm puzzled by this statement. In the script I sent, you ended up \_ with the names of all of the files in a single (array) variable so \_ they could be sorted later on. The actual contents of the files were \_ never actually read. Surely you don't mean that your filename data is \_ 60+MB, do you? Yeah, it's a great new compression scheme: the data in the file is transfered from file to file name, making it a file system storage thing. But the stored file itself is *real* small. As small as you want even. :-) \_ Regardless, you really do need to do the sort, because you can't rely \_ on find (or Perl's File::Find) to list the files in any particular \_ order. Good point. I think there is an order, but it'll vary depending on directory writes/rewrites, and is of only marginal usefulness to A-Z thinking. David