I tried that before, still nothing. I took it out just to see if I would get something back. I'm not using strict or -w only because i'm testing. i will once i get something usable. i'm not online with it. My ->ref{} can be any word at the beginning of a line in my file, and it should give me that same line back, right? is there a better way to do this? when i read in the file, i need the records in between the ";"s or between each "Beginning" and "End" to be separate records.