goldclaw and chromatic nailed it. don't even ask me why i didn't try that myself, it just hadn't occurred to me yet.
all of you seem to have either mentioned my use of "exists", either explicitly, or by replacing it with different code. is this just something new with 5.6, or what? i forget where i ran across the idea to use it, but it works just fine on my system... just looked at perldoc.org, and couldn't find this use of it defined. it's not documented on perl.com either. so i have no idea. but i swear by my bones that it compiles and runs!

In reply to thanks guys by YaRness
in thread parsing parameters in a new() object call by YaRness

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.