Your changes worked! Blessed are you among monks. At work I use Linux but use c shell for all my scripting. Virtually all of my peers use perl so thought I should see what everybody likes so much. I wanted to introduce my 9 year old to programming and thought this would be a simple program that he could play with. Thus I'm creating it with windows since my son is in a windows world. When I wrote this in basic many moons ago I used peek to return a value that would tell me if the V had hit a location with a T thus a collision. Any thoughts on how I could accomplish this with perl? The goal of the game is to move the V and avoid hitting the Ts as the scrolling slowly speeds up. I need a way to tell if a location has a character in it before the V is put in the location. If no way to do this I'll need to create a list of x,y locations that have a character. Prefer a peek type solution if anybody has one.