Thanks all for replies. I'm truly humbled that people a half a world away give my problems the time of their day. I have been able to make progress: I threw in use strict and use warnings even though they should have been implied by the -w in the shebang and using 5.011. I have to admit that I don't know what :std does...get back to you on that. I did make a reply to you regarding usage in your recent meditation that I hope you can take a look at Re^5: n-dimensional statistical analysis of DNA sequences (or text, or ...).