Your question has been answered, but I'd like to make another comment. Please do not use prototypes. It's clear from the code that you don't know how Perl requires them to be presented for them to operate properly.

A function with a prototype must be declared or defined prior to the function being called. In addition, a function that calls itself must be declared before it is defined, if it is to have a prototype. When calling the function, the prototype is ignored if you preface the function call with an ampersand. You've violated two of those rules; your prototype is wasted.

There's also the grim fact that prototypes in Perl are far less useful than most programmers expect them to be, and they enforce often bizarre requirements on the arguments to functions -- some of these have been fixed only in the most recent versions of Perl.

Prototypes are deep magic, and even the best magicians get by without invoking them.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
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