Perderabo,

This is a directory tree /ftp. Under this there are the users and their incoming and outgoing directories. Each user has their own directory for security reasons. Our customers don't want their data availible to the wrong vendors.
Files get removed by another daily cron job that finds files older than 10 days. The date can't be trusted as far as how many minutes old they are. So, find works fine for removing old the files. If they're transferred via CIFS it holds the creation date previous to the transfer. That's why I use the -cmin. It seems to work well and uses the access time of the transfer. But I think that's where some files fall through. I had to setup ntp on the server due to clock variations between the server and the clients causing problems with file times. Another reason to use the "find all files and diff them" logic.
This is simular to what (I guess) I was trying to say with the idea I was looking into. That is to say, find all the files under /ftp/*/outgoing and diff them for additions against the file list built 5 minutes ago. Using the diffed file names, the "database" would simply be a temp file containing the name and size. Grep for the file, awk the $NF for the size and compair till they're the same, sleeping for bit between checks to avoid frantic looping. When the run is finished delete the temp database. Removed files won't be an issue, since I'm only looking for added files between runs. If the file reapears, there's usually a good reason for it (corrupted IGES files, etc...) and the vendor should be re-notified.

I hope this makes sense. My fingers are too well connected to my brain.