and the winner is… Thank you for precisely the information I was looking for. I had tried something like your first answer, but the perldoc said parens or plus sign, not curley braces (what are they called anyway?), so I didn't get far. As for answer #2, certainly this works (although as I said, I hadn't gotten around to IO::Handle yet) but then so do a lot of other techniques as well. What I was looking for was what you explained— why it didn't work, not workarounds. Thanks again,hsm