Thanks guys. Since I added two-lines-two of code, I preferred valdez's and abell's solution: the code is now updated with a couple of comment lines above the added code, saying that the code is changed and why.

Thanks for your suggestions

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz