Okay, I'll check out XML::Twig; looks cool! I did find the actual root of the problem, though: on the line where I get the output from qstat, I do:  $qstat = `qstat -u \* -ext -xml -s r -F`; That backslash in the command is getting escaped and not being sent to the operating system, so the command wasn't even outputting anything. *doh*