Hi, Wednesday, July 6, 2005, 2:43:38 PM, you wrote: RL> Suppose I have a directory with a HUGE number of filenames, all of which RL> happen to look like integers: RL> ~/nntp/1 RL> ~/nntp/2 RL> ~/nntp/3 RL> . RL> . RL> . RL> ~/nntp/59874 RL> ~/nntp/59875 RL> ~/nntp/59876 RL> Now, in a PHP script, what's the most efficient way to find the "largest" RL> filename, where "largest" means in the sense of an integer, not a string? RL> I could probably force the filenames to be 0-padded if that would make a RL> significant difference. RL> Is there some nifty shell command I should just "exec"?... RL> I don't really care which shell, but I'm a bash user generally. RL> Obviously I could loop through all the filenames, so I'm looking for RL> something faster than that. :-) RL> -- RL> Like Music? RL> http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm You could try: $last = exec('ls -D /fullpath/nntp | sort -n'); echo "Largest: $last<br>"; -- regards, Tom -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php