thanks for the advice. I did not know about tell, it could be very useful. Originally I did not want to have the program remember which line i read last time because for each file that is going to be a different point. I see the problem with deleting as I go but is that an issue if they are just intermediate files anyways? I was thinking (and tell me if this is just silly) that this way I could easily tell if I had got all the lines from every file.