Wow thanks folks! The intent of my obviously controversial snippet of code was to save myself some work. I was taking an existing bit of transient cgi, and enhancing it so that I could save all my param()'s to a file as "var=val" pairs in a file on the server. When the user came back at some later date they could pick up where they left off.

If i was doing this from scratch I would go with the hash but i was being lazy and didn't want to modify the original code too much.

And thanks for the reference to a dissertation on perl stupidity, there must be many of us out there to require a 3 part article!

And finally I do very much appreciate this forum and your quick responses, I left the question on my way out from work and upon my return in the morning 3 responses. I couldn't pay for better support.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.