LOL....Thank you for the harsh rebuke:-). As for the warnings issue, I failed to mention that, but hadn't figured out what it was refering to until checking things out in Programming Perl. So, yes I do use warnings thank you very much. No offense, but I couldn't get your program to work as stated. It gave me the same problem I am asking about in this node. $target_name doesn't change, so only one key is present in the hash. I need the keys to continue changing with $target_name. Since that does not occur in either program, the question still stands....