thanks, good points. this all started because i didnt understand perl well enough to do what i wanted to do, and at the time i didnt know about cpan or perlmonks. so after many months of trial and error this system evolved.

I came to perl monks a few months back and found out a lot, but still none of the existing modules appear to do what i was working on, and it looked like a huge task to learn what to me was a whole new way of doing things. im still struggling with OO, it just wasnt on the syllabus when i did college, and as a result my code looks a lot like the ansi C i was trained to write all them years ago.