Agreed, Zaxo++. It should also be noted (as cal indicates that he is still new to Perl) for posterity's sake that passing arrays by reference is usually a Good Idea™. It eliminates the semantic clutter that often comes along with Perl's squishing the parameter list into one big list, and it is always faster to pass arrays by reference when passing anything but the most trivially sized arrays (which becomes crucial when dealing with Biggie-sized arrays on enterprise systems).