Thank you very much Monks! As always, hats off to you all for your nice and patient suggestions!

Reagarding, why I posted this question which I agree is less relevant to Perl directly is because lately I started to integrate this low level "ugly" language of C with "pretty" perl using a broker known as "inline:c.

And, why would I go to any other C-forums and all when I have such lovely guys out here...:)

regards, raj