You had to be right about this (your explanation was the only one I had and very elegant, to boot), but I couldn't spot where I was reading the changed file back into the array that you read the original into. I thought (could be wrong) I had made a local copy of the @strmeta ("structured metadata") variable for purposes of the deletion bits. I still think you had to be right, but I couldn't find the exact source of the error.

Instead I took George's advice and simply made @strmeta a global variable (er, well, I don't actually know if "global" is the right word--I didn't make a local copy), and didn't reload it after writing it to file, just used the altered @strdata array to print out the changed data. The problem went away!

Thanks very much to everyone!

--ghopper