I take your point about the use of subroutines. Although the code is going to do something useful it is also helpling me learn perl so I was experimenting a bit. The written out file won't be quite the same as that read in as the last item of each line will be a flag indicating the level of warning emails that have been sent out. The date will change too (10 11 104 in my example). Looks like my problem is splitting on white space. I copied some code from the SAMS book Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours which wasn't too clear on whether it was reading whole lines or not. FYI I know which items will be email addresses. Cheers. S.