add strict and warnings: Have had these on the whole time. Always good practice :) Which is why I found it so odd that it was failing silently.
where are you getting your @colors from?: A big nasty text document. It has a few thousand entries in a semi-normalized format. One of the attributes of each entry is a pipe delimited field which is put into an array. The point though is that @color isn't from another $sth. Though I do have other $sth in the script. Is there a risk from reusing this? Something I should do to ensure this functions as expected?
Thanks again for the help, I am a n00b when it comes to perl I am grateful for the patience and guidance.