I think I just copied the starting lines of this subroutine in from one of the other subroutines, chomp doesn't need to be there. I'm pretty new to this, and so may be using shift incorrectly/unnecessarily, but this has worked so far. The input for this subroutine is a block of text consisting of a (long) list of \n-separated search-strings. For this routine, I don't need them split, as I'm extracting the pertinent terms from ALL searches and compiling an alphabetized list of non-dupes.