Thanks for the input. The reasoning behind the (undef) = <FILE> area, was for a different program I was working on. It was reading through the file and printing out extra info I didn't want. So reading around, I found a small snippit, that after using, seemed to fix my problem. Will look at some of your above examples -- thanks again. (also, I knew some of my code was 'excess', which is why I added that line for suggestions on making it better :))