Thanks haukex, appreciate the links to the perldata doc. I usually can only get where I need to be in the docs via a Google search. Everything I know about slices I picked up from the last chapter of "Learning Perl 6th Edition", which only briefly points out that it can be done on arrays and hashes and the basics of how to do it. I'm pretty sure that's where I picked up the @gimme_this_slice_of_values{ @for_this_list_of_keys } trick. It's not like they could dive too deep in to usage on more complex data structures that would require dereferencing, and since they wrote that book under Perl 5.14 the Key/Value Hash Slice variation wasn't covered.