Thanks for the reply

The orginal code I posted was actually 'correct' (haven't had that happen before :). I just figured out what the problem was. The last print statement didn't have a newline on it, so it was printing, but was getting covered up by my shell prompt so I didn't think it was being reached. This would be a bug right? Would seem rather annoying for a specified behavior.

This is using perl, v5.8.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi on Redhat 8.0 with Konsole 1.1.3 using KDE 3.0.3-8.

Strangest problem I've had in a while. Thanks for the help :)