I'm looking after part of an application which batches up files concatanates them together and then moves the concatanated files to another directory. The problem I have is that the box runs Windows 2003 and UNIX shell emulation is provided by MKS Toolkit, when 10,000 or more files arive in the directory the script I have running to batch the files grinds to a halt when using an ls -l on the directory. Does anyone know how I could write a script that doesn't need to use ls -l or indeed the fastest way to do this in a korn compatible shell ?. Also the files need to be human readable so I'm not sure that cpio could be used.