Thank you ELISHEVA,

It's always good to learn something new, and doing I/O to a string is new to me. Since I use 'diff' a lot in *nix and also have my own editor for working with development files, I'm not sure how often I would use it.

As far as your 'black hole', you'll see the same with a regular file. I have prematurely closed a file handle and then later added a 'print' statement. No error, no warning and no data. Also if you save a file handle to disk and then retrieve, you need some 'Perl magic' to get it to be valid file handle again.

Thanks for the updated information...Ed

Regards...Ed