On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 10:58 , gkhgkh@attbi.com wrote: [..] > ipl of the server and therefore nulls wtmp [..] good God Man! no one uses 'ipl' - it will scare the kiddies.... Wags is correct that what you want to do is build a db solution, most likely something with the tie.... since what you are trying to do is parse out when they were last observed - hence a decent should would be a cron job that fires nightly to a) update the DB b) traverse the DB for b1: person not logged in for K days b2: accounts no longer in the nis/nisplus/LDAP/userManagementTool I would of course recommend that you do flat last - and cache when you saw the data.... my $lastTag =getLastTag(); open(FH, "last |").... while (<FH>) { last if /$lastTag/ ; #scarf up data for post processing ..... } ciao drieux ---Thread Previous | Thread Next