i'm pretty sure that print cannot be overloaded. in the Perl Cookbook, recipe 12.11, print is listed as one of the functions that cannot be overloaded as of 5.004. it refers to the function keyword() in toke.c for determining whether or not you can overload a built-in function. looking at toke.c in 5.6, it looks as if it is still not possible to overload print.