Thank you very much indeed! This is what I was after and so simple when you think about it! Greg.

PS to the others making suggestions about how to schedule multiple jobs etc, your suggestions are good in theory but the problem is more complicated than I outlined and pre-scanning at the beginning does not work in practice (for reasons including load-balancing due to different processing time (as mentioned) , the fact that the files that are available to process can change, that I often have to kill off jobs when other people want to use the cluster, etc, etc).

In reply to Re^2: randomising file order returned by File::Find by Anonymous Monk
in thread randomising file order returned by File::Find by jefferis

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