I appreciate your taking the time to hunt this down. Particulary since it is a relatively stale post. Maybe I should whine more often. (:

This does work as you suggested if I use:  use warnings; but it doesn't seem to help if I use  perl -w. I seem to recall reading a post sometime back describing the differences between the two, so I'll look for it again. Maybe I don't really need to use "-w".

Thanks again for your diligence!

--Jim