Yes, I do agree meaningfull variable names are needed. I forgot to mention, all of these funny variable names were in throw away code, early in my perl career or as a joke for co-workers that was shortly changed.

In regards to your VMS error, I have done something similar, without the humor though, put a debug message, even though in all accounts it should have never been executed. And of course, somehow my shebang was changed to #/usr/bin/murphy, or so I thought, and it was executed, fixed the code, after a few tests, and seeing the light. Good thing I put a message like "If you see this, something very wrong happened."

Thanks for your response!