thanks for all the replies! whats basically happeneing is that someone at work is writing a catalogue search program in clarion (i know, i'd write it in perl if it were feasible) and becuase of clarion's lack of networking support i was asked to write a program to download catalogue updates. i came up with the ingenious idea of downloading updates of each type, getting the modification time for each file downloaded and put it into an array (intrinsicly named after the type). after all files have been downloaded it would sort the array, get that latest modified file and put it into an ini file so next time the update program is run it will check the modification time of the file its downloading against the one in the ini file. probably not the best way to do things but i can't think of any other way at the moment - i'm sure that will change.