Justin MacCarthy wrote: > To change the question slightly; > > >>>#get earliest mdate in the directory is [STARTDATE] >> > I'm not sure what date format you want, but it should be easy to get from the following output which gives the oldest file in the directory: find /d/data -maxdepth 1 -printf "%p\t%T@\n" | sort -k2rn | tail -1 Padraig.