Can you be more specific? That will also help you write your requirements, which will lead to your pseudo code and then your code.
Do you want to search for a a pre-defined string (or set of strings), or just look for anything matching a pattern to appear in the first file? Related question: Can that string appear anywhere in the second file, or does it have to appear in a certain pattern (at the beginning of a line, followed by a colon or the word "error" or something? Do the log entries have timestamps, or will you be capturing the time your script found the string in file 1? What will you do if the script must be restarted and "forgets" what it found in the past eight minutes? If you're feeling ambitious, write some code. Figure out how to: 1. Read a file. 2. Locate the value(s) you are looking for and retain them somehow. Once you can do those two things, you can easily read the second file and seek the values you already found. A few lines to handle the eight-minute rule, and you're almost done. Post back when you have some code written. ShawnMilo -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
