Thank you all! The code wasn't mine, but belonged to a colleague who happens to have a strong C background. Forcing the use of prototypes in PERL smacked of heresy. After you reassured me that prototypes weren't required, I was able to go to his code and point out where he had declared a PERL subroutine with a "C" accent like this: sub mySubName () { BLOCKOFCODE } Once the parentheses were removed in the declaration, PERL no longer complained that a prototype was needed. Grazie!