I noticed that even in some of my 7 year old code I was normally using single quotes but there are one or two places where I used double quotes. I wonder what platform and what perl you are using? We had a Red Hat 3 (?) system here with perl 5.8.0 on it that had some really odd behavior.

As a side note, I suspect I was normally using single quotes because that's good practice if the string does not contain anything that needs to be interpolated. Though I suppose actually making them constants would be even better practice but I hate 'use constant'. What I really want is a constant that I can treat like a variable, so if ReadOnly was ever made Core I would likely use that.

Anyway, thanks for passing the solution on as I'm sure others can benefit and it's always great to hear how things turned out when someone asks a question. Err, well, except for paco, where the mystery is surely better than the answer (unless he has a great hot dog recipe).