The first part of answering any problem is asking the full question:

• How often will the contents change?
• How many times will this be called?
• How many users?
• How large are the files?
• Is there any reason (from the questions above) that you can't just use a cron job to create tar files periodically, saving system power, and user time?

J. J. Horner
Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/