Thanks, yeah, I just tried that syntax after reading thru the DBI docs. I got good functionality with:

   my $cmd = "select * from info where key=?";
   $sth = $dbh->prepare($cmd);
   $sth->execute($key_sel);

      my @row;
        while (@row = $sth->fetchrow_array ){
              print "@row\n";
              my $key =  $row[0];
            }
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I was wondering if I was just lucky. :-) Thanks for the link to your nice tutorial...I should have read it first....but.....:-)