Thanks, this is all very helpful. My perl is very rusty, but slowly coming back. I had just figured out the silliness of doing assignment inside the conditional, and could have saved myself a headache if I had read your response first!

My sub routines actually had alternative sorts, so they checked the first choice (title or date) and then the second one. I have also now figured out (again, the hard way) that regular string comparison works fine for my date format (not sure why I thought differently). Sigh, live and learn. But my code is getting better.