I have the error checking on my script, I omitted it here because I didn't want the code to be too long. The thing is, the parsing is working fine. The problem is, when I assign the result of the fields() function to some array, and then later use fields() again to a different array, I can't get at the data in the first array. It seems almost like a memory management issue behind perl somewhere because I'm carefully and correctly using scoping here and the array names aren't in conflict at all. I even tried copying the results to a new array but that gives me the hanging as well. If the code is working fine on your machine, I'm betting that it has to be something wrong with the installation or something on my machine :(