Thank you everyone for your comments, critiques and suggestions. I have looked over my code and made changes where they made sense to me.

Some of the suggestions left me with nothing to do but cut and paste the code in the reply (see the GenPass function, the use of a flags hash, the heredocs tip.) I did, of course, look over what the code did and saw why it was a better way, because unlike some who post questions on forums, I have no problem doing the work, I'm not looking for other people to do the work for me. I am here to learn. I just want that to be clear.

I think the biggest efficiency tip for me was putting all the characters in a string, then using regex to pull excluded types out of the string. Not only did that alone cut nearly 50 lines of code from the script, but it also cut out all the extraoneous loops that tested "dead" value characters between 33 and 126.

One thing that I may look into is incorporating a switch to handle (or offer) different character sets.

Again, thank all you monks, and here I post the updated version. Cheers:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Getopt::Long;
Getopt::Long::Configure ("bundling");

## PARSE AND SET COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS
## -----------------------------------------------------
my %flags=('symbols', 0, 'numbers', 0, 'uppercase', 0, 'lowercase', 0,
+ 'confusable', 0, 'help', 0, 'qty', 1);

GetOptions( 's|S|symbols' => \$flags{symbols},
        'n|N|numbers' => \$flags{numbers},
        'u|U|uppercase' => \$flags{uppercase},
        'l|L|lowercase' => \$flags{lowercase},
        'c|C|confusable' => \$flags{confusable},
        'q|Q:i' => \$flags{qty},
        'help' => \$flags{help}, );

# Set password characters, excluding those flagged on the command-line
my $pwdchars = join( '', map {chr} ( 0x21 .. 0x7e ));
    $pwdchars =~ s/\d+//    if ( $flags{numbers} );
    $pwdchars =~ s/[A-Z]+// if ( $flags{uppercase} );
    $pwdchars =~ s/[a-z]+// if ( $flags{lowercase} );
    $pwdchars =~ s/[_\W]+//g if ( $flags{symbols} );
    $pwdchars =~ tr/1Il0O//d  if ( $flags{confusable} );

# If user triggered the --help option flag, display and exit
if ($flags{help}) {            
    &DisplayUsage();    
    exit();
}

## START VALIDATE INPUT
## -----------------------------------------------------
my $kill=0;        # flag to stop the script if input is invalid (or -
+-help is used)
my @errmsg;        # error message descriptions

# If -q option was used to set a quantity of passwords, make sure it c
+ontains at
# least a value of 1 so that a password can be generated
if ($flags{qty} == 0 || $flags{qty} < 0) {
    $flags{qty}=1;
}

# Check that user hasn't excluded all character-types, warn user, kill
+ script
if ( length($pwdchars) == 0) {
    push @errmsg, "** 0x1: At least 1 character-type must be included"
+;    
    $kill=1;
}

# Check that user has passed only 1 argument (LENGTH) other than optio
+ns flags, warn user, kill script
if ($#ARGV > 0 || $#ARGV < 0) {
    push @errmsg, "** 0x2: Incorrect number of arguments passed";
    $kill=1;
}

# Check for only numeric input in LENGTH argument, warn user, kill scr
+ipt
if ($ARGV[0] !~ /^[0-9]+$/) {
        push @errmsg, "** 0x3: Invalid input. LENGTH argument must be 
+a numeric value";
        $kill=1;
}

# If any of the above validation tests triggered the $kill flag...
if ($kill == 1) {                     
    print "\n** GENPASS ERROR ----------------------------------------
+-----------------";
    print "\n** ".@errmsg." Error(s) found";      # display number of 
+errors    
    foreach my $err (@errmsg) {             # display error messages
        print "\n".$err;
    }
    print "\n**\n** Type genpass --help for command usage\n";
    print "** --------------------------------------------------------
+---------------\n\n";
    exit();                         # exit script
}
## END VALIDATE INPUT

## START MAIN SCRIPT
## -----------------------------------------------------
# From 1 to qty

for ( 1..$flags{qty} ) {
    print &GenPass( $ARGV[0] )."\n";
}
exit();

## END MAIN SCRIPT

## FUNCTION DEFINITIONS
## -----------------------------------------------------
sub GenPass() {
    my ($pwdlen) = @_;
    my $limit = length( $pwdchars );
    my $pwd = '';
    
    for ( 0..$pwdlen-1 ) {
            $pwd .= substr( $pwdchars, rand( $limit ), 1 );
    }

    return $pwd;
}

# use Here-Documents to display usage text
sub DisplayUsage {
    print <<"    USAGE";

    Usage: genpass [-OPTIONS] LENGTH
    Generate secure passwords LENGTH characters long.
    
        -s, --symbols\t\tExclude symbols.
        -n, --numbers\t\tExclude numbers.
        -u, --uppercase\t\tExclude uppercase letters.
        -l, --lowercase\t\tExclude lowercase letters.

    -c, --confusable\tExclude confusable characters like: l,I,1,0,O
        
        -q(X)\t\t\tCreate X number of passwords.
        
        --help\t\t\tDisplay this usage screen.
        
    Report bugs, comments, and questions to jbrown_home\@yahoo.ca
    
    USAGE
}

__END__
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