Ok, I admit it. No matter how much I look at that code, even my guesses at its function read like mental line-noise. :)

Then again, I've spent several days (trying) to work out how some (most) of your regex code works (this has been a permenant resident in my editor for two weeks now>). I guess I'm gonna need rather more than my current 8-weeks association with Perl to achieve that level of understanding.

I'm afraid my feelings re: this implicit use of the name of a filehandle to give a value to an autoloaded, global variable of the same name, is that it is at best, unintuative, and at worst, wholey redundant.

Maybe if I had experienced Perl 4 (or earlier) where this sort of thing was the norm, it would be less so. For now, I can only rely on the good ministrations of the more experienced, as yourself, to set me straight when I err.

Thanks again.