> ....it's certainly doing more than you describe Well, yes, it has stubs to print out the details of the final hash -- down to the base (scalar) level. Incidentally, I +think+ it has a problem at the ARRAY level -- don't think it necessarily handles arrays of hashrefs (cf arrays of scalars)... Re: the grep combination -- doesn't it assume you only have one level of hash keys ? -- and so doesn't allow generalizations to the multidimensional hash of hashes level? An advantage of the recursive traversal is that it's designed to descend through all levels...