Thanks tons ;-)).

Yeah, again, as I mentioned this was an old code, therefore it's *ugly* ;-(. I would try to avoid such code from now onwards.

Thanks all for your comments. $path_list is actually always an ARRAY reference (although, it's hardly obvious from the code ;-); therefore, I went into the trouble of checking whether it contained any elements and if not I simply made sure that the loop would run at least once (with $some_path set to ""). Frankly, I never knew that $some_path was just an 'alias' to the value. THat's definitely new to me hehe. However, the code doesn't break when there's at least 1 element in the array pointed to by the $path_list scalar. That's where I was confused...

"There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." -- Confession of Faith