Well i'm feeling more refreshed now

hhmmm - yes I do appear to have ommited some essential code, well that was a mistake, I decided not to put the entire program up in the first place as it is monstrous and I want to focus on the problem at hand rather than the general mess of my code, it's just about working at least.

I've done some debugging, as well as rewrote that bit so to avoid the nasty unless and recursive statement, and in fact the problem with uninitialised values is nothing to do with the code that I posted *oops* it was in fact an upstream subroutine, getting stuck on the /. and /.. entries in a directory no less.

My problem at the moment seems to be perl complaining about using a hash as a reference being deprecated, the issue is this particular line "$treeref = \%$treeref->{$::path$count};" (changed since the posting) it's there in order for the program to keep track of where it's got to in the particular tree. But perl seems to refuse me doing it, it probably has it's reasons. But I now have to think someway around it...

I am considering recoding the entire program, I put it together without really thinking, if people would like to have a look at it, then they can have a look at it on the code section.

it's suppsed to scan an entire filesystem, and return an XML file recording it's structure, but it's proving more difficult than I thought