Wow! Thanks eduardo, I'm going to take a look at all of that stuff, many thanks for responding so quickly. Yep, as you say it's probably only worthwhile prototyping in Perl which is what I am aiming it. After I know how to actually program it, I was going to rewrite it in plain old C. I'm really slow at programming C, and Perl gives me all those syntactic niceties :)

thanks once again!!