Thanks alot. I took most of grep's issues to heart, but extreme incompitance prevented me from realizing that when you pass values to a subroutine they are passed by reference so passing a reference to $l and %wordspl would not really slow anything down. It will take a little time for me to really parse your code, but thanks alot. I did post a better formatted and documented version of my program as a response to grep, if you want to have a look at it. Thanks again!