Didn't mean to shout Perl, more of praise over what I have been using (Korn). I ran your program and it seems to do the opposite of what was expected. "another-file" should strip out any lines in "file2", thats contained in "another-file" and print out only the lines that are not contained in "another-file". I just found out that the book I brought, a few months ago, was not ideally suited for beginners, have any suggestions for a good beginners book? Thanks, RCP