Well I have had the same kinds of problems, and have spent many hours online poring over the precious few perl resources in existence, bugging my friends, and using AIM to located hundreds of people with the common interest of Computing and Technology. My problem was an 'if' statement. I was comparing numeric values with the 'eq' operator. However, when i switched '==' with 'eq', the 'if' statement ALWAYS returned false. Lucky for me, while reading this discussion I noticed the 'chomp' command, incorporated it into my script, and everything worked perfectly. Wow, this site HAS to be the best perl site on the net.