No excuses - I accept the smacked botty. I do indent generally, and am not sure why I didn't in this case. All part of the learning curve, I suppose.

I'm very interested in what you say about param() accepting a list as this point doesn't come out in Sam Tregar's explanation he uses the code as I do (tho' with impeccable indentation):

# fill in some parameters in the template
  $template->param(home => $ENV{HOME});
  $template->param(path => $ENV{PATH});
[download]

So thanks very much for that.