Your suggestions make a lot of sense. Documentation is a very good thing that I'm not very good at. I will have to get to grips with POD but it's something I have been putting off.

The use of a command-line option would indeed make things easier but I wanted to use ALRM handling just to learn how to do it. I wrote this some years ago and the first cut of the ALRM stuff was pretty crude. I tweaked it more recently with the countdown, again because I thought it would be interesting to learn. I'm not sure about your "... and a lot easier to use." There's not a lot of difference between

% newscript -e fred
[download]

and

% newscript fred
... prompt ... y
[download]

Thank you for the feedback,

JohnGG