rinceWind, I am running this on Win2k actually. The program sits in the same directory as the data files though. Would network problems still affect it? Also, Abigail, would it be any faster if I gathered all of the file names into a seperate hash or array? BTW, the reason, I am concerned with speed is that I would like to eventually use part of this code on an internal website as a kind of file archive search. If it really came down to it, I could just create a separate index file with the data I need, then update it weekly and search on that, but how much fun is that? Thanks.

Update: I crossed out the line above because I realized that with either scenario, it's still going to glob the file names into something and therefore it still has to read ALL of the file names. Thanks Abigail.