Eureka!!! Thank you all so much. I want to learn Perl the right way, so I'm using strict and warnings, so when I got the message ""$showPUV" requires explicit package name" I started hunting, and found my(). I misunderstood the context, and then when I found our(), I thought they worked together, the my() to declare and the our() to reference. I changed my my()'s to our()'s and it works properly with no warnings!

I'm going to like it here in the monastery.

Thank you all for your prompt and correct replies, and for not being mean :-)

Kelly