G'day it's me again (I've registered BTW) Thanks for the advice regarding switches and so on... I have a book but i'm REALLY doubting its reliability It's full of typos in code AND text (to the point where I had to debug the first example to get it to work!) so any advice on suitable replacements would be most appreciated too. It didn't mention anyhing about a CGI module, what exactly is this and how does it work? (obviously the syntax is in the replies) And thanx for the information on the HTML headers, it explains why I keep getting "insufficient header information" errors. I'm trying to run this script on my linux box using Apache and the counter script I wrote worked, even with the suspect HTML headers. I will give your advice a try when I next get on my linux box and let you know how it goes. I have read\heard that code setting out etc. is very important in perl and cgi scripts, not for functionality but for debuging and portability does my code look ok or are there some things to improve. It does look a bit suspect centred though. Thank you very much for your help and I think I may call on you in the future. La_Grenouille lagrenouille@cyberarmy.com