Ahmad,
Thanks. That is not messy and works. Similar to the "Method 1" that I used.
The "brute force" method gained a factor of 50 in time on the loop. Your loop (similar to my first go at it) gained a factor of 2.
To the mods: I hope I am not getting off track. I have found responses quite helpful. Ugly code can work faster than pretty code, but sometimes perl can be unintelligable, short and extremely fast.