Caroline,

The only problem is some of the bins I am dealing with are 8 characters in length. What I was looking for was their an alogorithm like multiplying all characters together and storing the integer of that. Then searching between 2 sets of numbers with an index. Extremely fast, but the only problem is the number would have to be huge (in this example 36^8). So I said how is Microsoft doing this? Their has to be a way of doing this because the OS can handle 255 character filenames, with numbers and letters and sort them "logically". I don't believe they are storing a huge number for every file. I mean a number like 255^50. Have to take into account all combinations of numbers and letters and special characters.

Dale