The phone number is not being treated as an octal number. Numbers are only considered octal if Perl encounters a constant number in the source with a leading zero.

my $oct = 017;
my $dec = "017";
print $oct+0, $/, $dec+0; #plus zero forces it to be numeric
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That prints 15, newline, 17. However, as for your actual problem, I don't see what's going on. Have you tried printing directly?

print "Dialing $index of $total on $ref->{datetime}: $ref->{host}, $re
+f->{phone}, $ref->{description}\n";
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Hmm... I see that that you did try that. Never mind.

I seem to recall a similar problem on Windows when accepting reading data from STDIN. Had something to do with the cntl-Z that you had to use to end input eating up the next line that's printed. I had to insert an extra print before the actual printing to get around that. Have you tried that?

Cheers,
Ovid

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