hi, if I had a cron script delete files every 4 hrs, 6x a day, would i have to be concerned with the script timing out if it was to delete 100,000-200,000 10kb size files? The files will never exceed 10 kb's.

The file sizes should be irrelevant in most filesystems that I know of. But timed out by what? Do you mean overlapping with the next run? I doubt so. Testing on XP with ntfs, which by far I doubt to be the most efficient situation:

C:\temp>mkdir test

C:\temp>cd test

C:\temp\test>perl -e "for (1..100_000) { open my $f, '>', $_ or die $!
+ }"

C:\temp\test>perl -le "$n=time; unlink 1..100_000; print time-$n"
55
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