Firstly, we're several posts into this thread and only found out that you have a requirement to deal with up to 20 different paths, with no mention of how you expect the correct paths to be passed to the 50 or so child scripts. What is your criteria for this? Ideally you'd have explained this in your initial post (I've asked you to read this a few times now). There are many ways to use config type files within perl, example.