actually I do want to poll for changes primarily wish to scan periodically to ensure that mtime is still changing, I can have the scan run once the files are copied, but then it will only happen every few hours, it should not cause too much extra processor or disk usage right? all that is being written to the file currently is a single line of data, but there are 50+ files and the data consists of time tests to perform operations on an application which is dependent in turn on ie and active x so I can't easily code my own testing app for it. Eventually I will probably do something with .net and fiddler to create a more custom solution but for now I just need to make sure its running when it should, I will need yet another script to validate the data files but I plan on doing that after they have been copied over to the destination directories. Thank you for the example.