Kenosis and Davido, you both hit the nail on the head. The purpose of it is precisely what Kenosis said as well. I understand the hash creation now but the ++ seems very odd to me. How can the $refr_url be initialized as ++? It has not been defined as anything yet. Is it something like: undef++ which evaluates to 1? I don't understand how a key's value can be incremented when it hasn't even been defined as anything yet.