The function reserved_word is different to $reserved_word and @reserved_word. The use of $, @, or % means that they don't conflict with reserved words. What you do have to watch out for are conflicts with nonvariable identifiers such as labels and filehandles. Usually these last two are all in UpperCase, as in his script.

If you are truly uncomfortable and want to avoid using reserved words in variable names, you could simply globally change the variable names.

No, the script worked pretty much straight out of the box. What did cause some amusement was forgetting to include all the pipes in the text delimited file - that one caused a deal of amusement until it was caught.

The only other thing that caused some difficulty was using the GUI front end to load and edit data - this was sometimes very slow and I'm not sure why, perhaps something to do with the file locking mechanism.

MadraghRua
yet another biologist hacking perl....