I wish you well on your Perl journey! You did a bunch of stuff right including: a) asking a clear question, b)showing some code that shows that you are making an attempt. Whether or not your code works is not that important. I mean you wouldn't be asking for help if everything worked. Right? My theory is that there is a finite "quanta" of information that can be transferred and absorbed in one thread. I think we are there. Go forth and write more code!