Wow, what a helpful and quick batch of responses. You monks are better than the Pool of Radiance forum (grin).

I was in the middle of applying your suggestions when suddenly everything started working. I hate that, I mean I'm glad it's working but now I don't know why. Magic scares me.

I checked permissions, but all files involved had already been 777'd.

I added an 'or die' to one of file opens, and added 'perl' to the system call. I added the -w arg to the opening line and 'use strict'. But then the code wouldn't compile at all, it wanted some kind of package (?) for each global? I am clearly going to need more info here... I assumed 'my' meant a local scope and 'our' meant global. So much for the handy perl tutorial.

So I commented out the strict and removed the -w and checked to see if it would compile. And it not only did but also worked as well.

I do not understand at all why it suddenly worked when I made no changes to the pieces that seemed to be broken.

I have some more specific questions to specific replies, but first I wanted to thank all of you, very much, for helping me.