Thanks alot to jdporter,pg,bart and everyone else that helped with this node. I did put an extra semicolon in there, as did jdporter in his solution, sorry about that. I haven't started using -w yet, as I'm just starting to use strict and realize why I should have used it in the past...gimme a little time to wean myself onto that one.

I think the reason my prototype and parameter passing was so off was my brain thinking in the wrong language(How dare I). But using $_ as many of you pointed out did the trick. I like to use functions in this manner because it is flexible, but not by way of "destructive cleaning".

bW