I get 420. It appears you ran the wrong program. You use the program just like you showed (the sorting is included in the "Sample use" part of the code).

you were right. however, I copied the text from permuting w/dup...and saved it with , .pl when i ran it from the command prompt it just gave me another command prompt. I had no chance to input any data. oh yeah, can it permute numbers too? my command prompt looks like as follows: perl permnodup.pl then i hit enter. Even if i doubleclick on the icon permnodup.pl the perl msdos window comes on and goes off, instead of waiting for my permutation. What am i doing wrong? I await your enlightenment!!!!!!

You should enter the words (or letters or numbers) on the command line like "perl permnodup.pl a a a b b c". Feel free to change this part of the code:

#Sample use:
@ARGV= sort @ARGV;
do {
    print "@ARGV\n";
} while( nextpermute(@ARGV) );
[download]

to do something else. Here is a more versatile version:

#Sample use:
my @elts= @ARGV;
my $sep= " ";
do {
    if(  ! @ARGV  ) {
        print "What to permute? ";
        my $line= <STDIN>;
        chomp( $line );
        exit 0   if  "" eq $line;
        if(  $line =~ / /  ) {
            $sep= " ";
            @elts= split " ", $line;
        } else {
            $sep= "";
            @elts= split //, $line;
        }
    }
    @elts= sort @elts;
    my $cnt= 0;
    do {
        print ++$cnt, ": ", join( $sep, @elts ), "\n";
    } while( nextpermute(@elts) );
} while(  ! @ARGV  );
exit 0;
[download]

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")