I read bart's excellent dissertation on split recently, but my problem wasn't solved there... im hoping the wisdom of the monks can aid me (no idea on chatterbox at the time i logged) I have code which opens up a file, reads in the contents, breaks it into an array, and keeps the last 20 elements, joins, and puts back in, as thus: 
#grap the string from the file 
local $/=undef;
open FILE, "messages.txt" or die "Couldn't open file: MESSAGES $!";
$string = <FILE>;
close FILE;
$string =~ tr/\n//d;
#remove the last twenty lines: split it into an array by :
@a = split(/:/,$string);
splice (@a,0,-20);
$stringb = join(':',@a);
#fix up da file, so it dont have no more than 20 lines, foo!
open MS, "> messages.txt";
print MS "$stringb";
close MS;

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And this script is run by the user rather frequently (it does other things too). There's another script that adds " sometext :"to the end messages.txt file. Here's the problem. When i manually edit the messages.txt file and add in more than 20 elements, it cuts it fine. but when my script adds more than 20 elements, the messages.txt file doesn't get cut. Any ideas? I'm utterly flabbergasted

In reply to slighly newbish question by perlnewb

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