Dropping Tables

I have researched this and can't find an answer. Maybe I am just looking in the wrong places or not putting the correct keywords into the search engines. So any help would be greatly appreciated. I am using MySQL with PHP. I have some PHP scripts that create tables in a database that are meant to be temporary but can't actually create "TEMPORARY" tables to do the job. That isn't the problem in itself. The problem is that sometimes if the script is stopped prematurely, it doesn't get to the drop table function in it. All of the tables that are created for this start with an "a" and follow with a random number. What I need to do is to create a script that I can run that will delete all tables that start with an "a" in the database. Again, since the table name is randomly generated except for the starting "a", I will need the script to find them and drop them. Has anybody done this before? I would sure appreciate some help here. Thanks Steve -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. ow3