Wow BlackMateria, you are a star, it works a treat and I have read up on all the bits and understand now how it works!! Thankyou so much. Now I have another query...if you can help me out on this one I would be forever in your debt! I now need to run a HTML search which asks for a keyword which will then open up my new perl script and display the results in HTML. At the moment I put a peice of data in $keyword and it finds all the records when I run the script, but how do I get the HTML to overwrite that keyword so it can change everytime the need a different search? Hope that makes sense!! So in essense with everything put together, a person gets a HTML page which asks what the would like to search for, they put in a keyword, the result is then shown on a html for that particular file. Cheers Jason