Fast Way to get a Path to files in thumbnail folders

[Brahmanathaswami]

I'm working on  catalog delivery system in our new web site.

one of the media types is "slideshow" and we have a path that we can 
programatically build from the database data that knows what year the 
photos were taken and has a file ID that match the folder on disk... 
After that we also know that the thumbnail/image we want for a 
gallery/catalog view is going to be in a folder call "preview"

We also really don't care which thumbnail we use for the catalog,

So of course we could do something like this

on a repeat loop

put "/media/slideshows/" & tYear & "/" & tFileID & "/preview" into 
tThumbsFolder
set the defaultfolder to tThumbsFolder=
put line 1 of the files into tGalleryThumb

# then create small function to build the image tag:

put format ("img src=\"" &tThumbsFolder & "/preview/" & tGalleryThumb & 
"\" />" into tGalleryImage

and then push that in the table. That's pretty obvious

But I've had trouble in the past with repeatedly with resetting the 
default folder on a loop like this and it seems like a lot of disk 
reading when we really don't care which file we use and we also a) know 
there will always be one and b) it always ends in *.jpg

I am wondering if there is some reg-ex magic that I could use to just 
read the first file in say this folder:

/media/slideshows/2008/2008-01-08_cambodia/preview/*.jpg

where by I can avoid having to repeatedly reset the defaultfolder and 
get "the files"

i suppose I could use a shell cmd but if you use something like

"/media/slideshows/2008/2008-01-08_cambodia/preview/*.jpg" in a shell 
you will get all the files in the folder and not just the first one.

Any ideas?

Brahmanathaswami (new name of he who was formerly Sivakatirswami)