Another small note: Don't abuse the strings "false" and "true" as replacement for boolean values. It makes your code harder to maintain, and it is more work for perl. Worst of all, Perl consideres BOTH values as true. There are exactly three values that Perl treats as false: 0, '', and undef, and you really should use one of those, preferably the first or the second, instead of "false". All other values are treated as true, but except in rare cases, you should use 1.

So: replace "false" with 0 or '', replace "true" with 1. Replace $whatever eq "true" with $whatever, replace $whatever eq "false" with !$whatever.

Alexander