Thanks, that worked magnificiently!.

However I notice something surprising -- if the width of the $cookie format line is increased beyond a certain limit ( 63 in the above example ), the last line is gobbled up completely when being printed!

The perlform documentation says at the very end - "The remaining whitespace character, \r, forces the printing of a new line if allowed by the picture line.". Any idea if this is responsible for what's happening ?

I can get by with adjusting the format width to the correct amount, but it would be nice to know the reason anyhow.