Thanks wog,

Your response about the exists operation lead me to really look at where the array ref is installed. I changed the following line (where ever it occured):

$cacheHOA{$sum}=($name);
[download]

to 2 separate lines:

$cacheHOA{$sum}=();
push @{$cacheHOA{$sum}}, $name;
[download]

and now it works, obviously i thought i was (in the one line version) assigning an annon array with one member, which also obviously did not work (why not?).

In the two line version i explicitly assigned an empty list and then pushed the member in.

Thanks for letting me bounce this off of y'all! Sometimes all you need is to have someone look at what your doing and say "Dude, you fscked that right here!"(points and smacks your head...)
_________________
madams@scc.net

              (__)
              (\/)
       /-------\/
      / | 666 ||
     *  ||----||
[download]

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