It's been nearly ten years since I've said anything here. Somehow, this seems appropriate. I, as many perl hackers have, tend default to quick "print" statements for debugging, only to be shot down when throwing my code at, say, multiple input files at once, for example. No longer. Sure, your code works for *most* of the files, but something is twitchy somewhere. Unicode when you expected ASCII. A mix of LF/CRLF line endings. CR line endings (horrors!) even :) But: if you print where you think things are going wrong, that output goes in the STDOUT queue. The errors that pop when things go wrong happen in the STDERR queue. Hence, "warn" is your bestest friend evars! Trust me on this. You'll get all sorts of win using "warn" context points when you want to debug via print-ing.