> Anyone know of a quick and easy way to find the date of the newest file in a directory tree. What kind of systems do you want to be doing this on? If it's linux with a kernel version of >= 2.6.13 you might (if it was enabled in the kernel) have inotify available. For a complete description see google, but simply inotify allows a program to watch the file system for events. So you could make a simple process to watch your tree for appropriate events (file modifies etc.) and keep track of what is most recent. leif