You could do something like this so that every process will know if the file "belongs" to it without prior coordination, it means a lot of redundant hashing though.
In [36]: import md5 In [37]: pool = 11 In [38]: process = 5 In [39]: [f for f in glob.glob('*') if int(md5.md5(f).hexdigest(),16) % pool == process ] Out[39]: -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list