I agree that the tone of "go figure it out yourself and come back with code" that some responders take on posts like these is not very welcoming. However, I think it's a good idea to ask someone to show some effort, in encouraging terms of "we'll help you figure it out" (I like davido's response). I think it helps the learning process, and also, as opposed to just providing a piece of code, it helps weed out those people who are just asking others to do their work for them, and those who will simply copy and paste a piece of code without trying to understand it. At the very least, it'd be nice to know the OP's level of Perl knowledge.