Thanks very much for your reply. I've been trying to apply your solution to my script though without success. I turned it into a standalone script but it still keeps failing and I can't track down the reason why (I've checked for syntax errors etc and it comes out ok) so I'm obviously off base with mu application still. What I have is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);
use CGI ':standard';

$prepage = "/path/to/page";



print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
#open file:
open (PAGE, "$prepage") || die "Couldn't get prepage ched";
@prep=<PAGE>;

while( my $line = <PAGE> ) {
         if( $line =~ /<!--a -->/ ) {
# could do index(), if looking for exact match like this
            suba();
            last;
         } elsif( $line =~ /<!--b -->/ ) { # ditto
            subb();
            last;
         }

   }

close (PAGE);



sub suba{
print "suba says hi!";
}

sub subb{
print "subb says hi!";
}
[download]

So what am I doing wrong now?!!