hey all, thanks for your responses. I learned a lot by looking at your different approaches to this. To answer Toolic's question, no, the book does not show this code. It shows an example problem:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "enter several strings on different lines then ctrl+D\n";
chomp( my @lines = <STDIN> );

print "1234567890" x5 . "012345\n";  #a "ruler" for output field width

printf "%20s\n"x@lines, @lines;
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and I wanted to expand on that form/function with using hashes too. just making more examples up for myself. thanks again! -Ben