in reply to get my variable out of the hole!

I wanted to be able to strip that seconds field from the timestamp, so that 14:18:54 would become 14:18

If your input lines look like   Sep 15 14:18:54 203.146.91.228:23 202.88.143.72:23 Then a regular expression like   s/^(\w{3}\s+\d+\s+\d+:\d+):\d+(.*$)/$1$2/; should strip off seconds. No need to split() the line into tokens to process it.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom