Find largest integer filename

Suppose I have a directory with a HUGE number of filenames, all of which happen to look like integers: ~/nntp/1 ~/nntp/2 ~/nntp/3 . . . ~/nntp/59874 ~/nntp/59875 ~/nntp/59876 Now, in a PHP script, what's the most efficient way to find the "largest" filename, where "largest" means in the sense of an integer, not a string? I could probably force the filenames to be 0-padded if that would make a significant difference. Is there some nifty shell command I should just "exec"?... I don't really care which shell, but I'm a bash user generally. Obviously I could loop through all the filenames, so I'm looking for something faster than that. :-) -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm