touche', but in defense of the OP, his use of a built-in perl slurpish function in the first algorithm is the foundation upon which the second is built. And he implied he'd hand-typed these in a few times, so the smaller/simpler the better, even if only by one line/several keywords. And finally, he didn't say the resource being taxed was the RAM, but the filesystem. The disk subsystem generally being the weak point in modern servers with multi-gigabyte RAM and fast CPU(s).