Ahhh ok. I thought that I would no longer be able to call $cfg once inside the 'unless'.. Well that fixed the problem. Thank you. I still have another problem specific to this module.. maybe youve seen something simular before. here is my current code 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Config::Simple;

my $config_file = shift;
        if (!$config_file) {
                $config_file = "etc/allweb-backup.conf";
        }

my $cfg = new Config::Simple($config_file);
my (%Config);
unless (%Config = $cfg->vars()) {
        die "CRITICAL: $config_file is not a valid INI file!\n";
}

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I tried the unless statement wrapped around the $cfg line, and that gave me an error.. In the above I wrapped my unless around the %Config line, that also gave the same error.. I guess neither is returning false when it craps out. Any idea how I can get it to die and print my message instead of the message in the module... this is the error message I get when running this code. 
Something went wrong. No supported configuration file syntax found at 
+/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2/Config/Simple.pm line 184, <FH> 
+line 16.

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In reply to Re^2: For the life of me, i can't figure out this "use strict" variable problem by dcasey
in thread For the life of me, i can't figure out this "use strict" variable problem by dcasey

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