Thanks for the reply.

That's sort of what I was thinking, a little process to connect up and check and then if found kick of the main shell. Just concerned with opening and closing a connection that often, after all that would mean 720 connections to the FTP during the space of a day from my process alone, let alone with the external companies dropping files on there. I'm just not overly keen on that. Then again I could just be being a little precious about it