i did what u have mentioned in ur mail, i changed $* to $@ and the result is the same. and one more thing i forgot to meition, when i call the shell script giving command line arguments and pass them to the perl script i see all the command line arguments and options present in the perl command in the shell script, but the thing happening here is that the very first if loop as mentioned in the code ie if (exists $options{x}) { do some thing } is giving positive irrespective of the option passed.... what wud be the problem here