They system already uses a berkly database system. unfortunately, the whole point of this project is because the current tools that do the kind of thing you describe, break once in a while. the tool im working on needs to basically verify what is ACTUALLY available at the filesystem level, not what "should" be available. What im really looking for is possibly a better approach to the overall design algorithm of my code. i feel it could be accomplished more effectivly. at the highest level, i need to send a filename to each node in the system, then have the node figure out if the file exists on that node (using globbing, because we dont always have the full path), and send the full path of the filename back if its found.