Yeah...Perl is really cool. As I said before (see above) I come from a functional/procedural background, so that's what my code tends to look like. (Personally, I like parenthesizing... :)

This code is very nice, very clean. I wonder what the speed difference is? I may adopt this style in a later revision (although possibly still pre-production) because the program is part of a stress level monitoring toolkit, with the obvious desire to keep the induced stress as low as possible. So, if I can exec 1 program instead of 5, I lower the induced stress quite a bit.