So it is just one page, I need to take the multiple pages access has generated and turn them back into one. This must be done before anyone accesses the page, but after the report has been run (daily). It seemed to me that when the page was accessed was a good trigger. If I can use the apache log file to trigger a script that does the appending, i would be delighted....but i now have half an hour left to mend this ugly oversight on my part ( I blame access) and don't know if I can understand this awk thing in that time. Mind you...or php......
As brett has suggested, it's best to do this on the fly. What brett hasn't pointed out is that there's not necessarily any noticable difference to server load in doing this.
Reading several small files is the same as reading one big file, ignoring a small directory access overhead (think 1+1+1+1 = 4 verses 4 = 4 -- the bandwidth and IO requirements are more or less the same).
It's always better to do any processing required by a request on the fly. By all means cache the results, if computing them is resource intensive, but in this case, caching them wouldn't save you any effort.
P.