Randy> I am learning Ruby right now. You can also ask your question on Randy> the bostonrb.org mailing list: Randy> http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup That's a great suggestion. I've been learning Ruby (on Rails) on an off for the past year or so, but this is my first real dive deep into the language and it's expectation. I'm not enjoying it really. :] Guess I'm too hardwired for Perl5. :] Thanks for the suggestions. Basically, I'm trying to extend 'philesight' to be able to recursively descend directories building it's DB of sizes, but with multiple kid or slave processes to spread the work out and have it complete faster. I actually had this working just fine with Ruby Threads, but then I found out that Ruby has a single thread for the interpretter, and jsut emulates real threads. So no performance gain. Now I'm working on forking() off kids to do the work, but the coordination is being painful. Anyone interested in what I've got? John