Thanks to everyone who helped out with this one, I always had trouble with pointers in C++, and I guess it rubbed off onto references in Perl. I used gjb's code example, and it worked great. But I'm wondering if I could have changed the line my($dateRef) = @_; to my(dateRef) = $_[0];

Also thanks for pointing out my bad programming with the scope of the $_[0] in my first example.

bW
Learning something new everyday!