Yeah, I see what you mean. my doesn't make sense within the scope of the while loop. I was actually thinking about declaring $varAlias so that it would be in the same scope as *varAlias but I didn't make that clear. Keeping with the idea that variables should be declared in the smallest scope possible, our is the better bet. I'm not always clear on the use of my, our and local. Since we are trying to access a more global variable in this while loop, would local work as well? From the code, it seems that the actual value in $varAlias upon entry is not important. Of course, if that is true, then why would we care to preserve its value?