Thank you Jarich,
this is just what I needed. I must confess that I did comment out the use of strict. Ummmm, I was getting a ton of error messages when I included strict that did not understand. For instance Global symbol "$year" requires explicit package name at ./date_calc_test.pl line 7. I am on page 67 of Learning Perl "Notes on Lexical (my) Variable". Maybe this will enlighten me! cheers, Grasshopper.