And wouldn't it be the perfect thing to put in a descriptively-named one line subroutine that hides the Perl-voodoo in only one place, and tells everyone else exactly what it's supposed to do? Mmmmm....? Perl has lots of ways to write something such that you don't know at a glance what it's supposed to do, and it doesn't actually do what you intended for it to do or thought that it did, either. Sure would be nice to be able to fix any problems in one place.