While your thoughts are decent a problem still persists. I probably haven't made this too clear, however. I cannot block during the read of the logfile. To do so would delay actions requested outside of the vote session by $map_vTimelimit seconds which would just be poor service to everybody trying to do things on the server during that vote session.

Im thinking that the POE idea is going to be my best bet. The sample code Eduardo posted looks quite promising. Because what I am looking for is a ''backgrounded timer'' which doesn't block that I can monitor for completion so when it is done counting I can proceed to call a sub-routine.

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- Jim
Insert clever comment here...