aha, yes.. my understanding of a flipflop operator seems to have been flawed but now the behavior makes sense to me. however, since I'm now just grabbing $1 twice across two regexes, is there any way I can print both instances on one line? with one regex? I can put two if statements in there with one regex print per but that seems clunky. my end goal is to come up with a file that has a line that shows the Pseudo Name and Logical Device ID fields as a pair for each paragraph entry.