merlyn's solution is the better way to do it, I agree.

I like your solution as well, I didnt think of using negation within the if construct.

More than anything, I was just trying to figure out how perl would handle me combining if and unless within one statement.
Like I did with:

unless (/^#!/) {next READ if (/^\s*#/)};
[download]

And how although that works the following does not work and perl proceeds to give an error:

if (/^\s*#/) { next READ } unless (/^#!/);
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By looking at perl code from others I have seen how perl is flexible in how you structure things. You are not forced into a specific way of doing it such as the following.

if (/^\s*#/) {
  next READ
}
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Can be easily written:

next READ if (/^\s*#/);
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I'm still unsure of how perl will handle certain structures. For example I would have coded the above example the first way thinking perl would of complained about the structure of the second.

THANKS!
zzspectrez