Wow, I never thought I would get a response from one of the authors. Thanks. Anyway, I was hoping to get more visibility into this specific technique.

I like how file handles are created on the fly in this code. I was thinking that all the filehandles are created through autovivification and that a new update of that specific module closed some security holes by forcing stricter programming practices

I am thinking the next step is to explicitly create the object with "new" if the islander hash key isn't present yet. Is there anything I can do to get the current code to run? Can I only do it by modifying the module itself?

-actualize