Melly wrote: The abs $2 is to chop off any leading 0's (00012 to 12 for example).

If you run into this frequently, you can just add zero to the string to force a numeric context and eliminate those zeroes.

perl -e '$foo="007";print "$foo\n";$foo+=0;print "$foo\n"'
007
7
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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