Today I was recommending this thread to a friend (gratuitous self-promotion) when I saw all the additional comments that have been added since I first posted.

I've complained to Rob G. before that the Hints portion of this website needs a "subscription" method, just like the Forums here (and just about everywhere) have. Then, I would have known there was so many additional comments after I posted the Hint!

Anyway, now that I've caught up on the comments, I will say that the ubergeek in me is vastly impressed by how much SOX was able to shrink my script down. Very nice!

At first, I was confused by gourls' "clueless" comment, and then I realized he thought Doug's "newbies are clueless" comment was directed at me. I assume Doug was referring to the numerous Mac people (including many esteemed macosxhints readers) who are not UNIX/Terminal-savvy. I should have included the requisite "chmod" command in the original Hint, but I do forget that some people are familiar with that.

Anyway, I appreciate SOX's minimal-Perl effort (although Perl newbies might want to use the original code, since you can easily pick your own fields to be compared) and, as always, I appreciate Doug's tireless AppleScripting work! :-)

Of course, it's been almost a year since the last comment, so I doubt either of them are still monitoring this hint. We really need hint subscriptions...