about the using "require" suggestion; I did read in my (camel | llama) book the very same thing. I ran into some problems, though when running under different versions of perl (5.5x vs. 5.6), and using the "cat" method worked everywhere.

I don't remember exactly what went wrong, I figure that since the script is only useful on aix, if /usr/bin/cat isn't there, there are bigger problems. :-) (i've added the full path to cat, now, just in case.)

-s-