in reply to removing square brackets

Sure you just need to use a regular expression. Open each file and loop over each line like this:

while( my $line = <IN> ) { chomp($line); $line =~ s/\[//g; # Remove ['s $line =~ s/\]//g; # Remove ]'s # Either print out to STDOUT here or # write to another file }

Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org>
http://www.wiles.org