>> but i was under the impression that tree searching is just not fast >> enough in a real production environment on VMS< simply using >> wildcards? am i out of date? Phil demonstrated to me once that finding >> files on the TeX Live CD was veeery slow (unless I misremember) I don't remember; but in reality: if the tree contains only files of interest, then VMS lib$find_file will certainly be fast and efficient; if the tree contains irrelevant files, then lib$find_file may well be too slow. Which is the situation for TDS?