Indeed. In hindsight, it's a logical place and name for such functionality, but (as may be clear) I didn't find it. I guess I should have phrased is as a SOPW then, rather than creating a subroutine to do this. ;-) as I could have known someone would already have made something like that.

On the other hand, this will work even if overload is not loaded, so you can apply it to a blessed value always. So there is some merit in doing it this way.

Learned something again today (well, actually, it's already tomorrow here ;-)

Liz