Maybe not.  The changelog describes more than just posting activity, so
it is quite possible that the most recent message that went out through
the list won't appear within the last N entries of the file. Things like
a burst of join/leave activity, or detected-virus traffic hitting the
list, can make it necessary to scan the files from their beginning. 
Even a list with no "real" posting for a couple of years could still
have lots of recent changelog entries.

>>> [log in to unmask] 12/27/2006 9:15:35 AM >>>

Since the goal of the original request was to see the last post in each

list, could you have jsut done "tail -50" (or whatever number would
mnake 
sense) on each log and processed the results of that rather than
looking 
at the beginning of the log since that info would be superceded by 
subsequent lines in the log?