the last statement /can/ be one of many, and in my code you will see that i can add a last statement before or after formatting from hex to plain text, which is great that i could understand that, but on my observance in the files, it will always end with just the two that are in my code, if i come across a different "last" statement then i can easily add it in. the infinite loop would only happen if i didnt know what was in the file ;)
im just trying to grasp the subroutine stuff :) i admit i am still pretty new to perl but it has been by far the best language to use so far.
thanks for the ideas man, cheers :)