Thank you all for your answers. I didn't receive a notification that there had been answers to my thread. FYI, I am running perl-5.8.8 on Linux which I have compiled myself with normal options selected. I noticed quite a few of these empty files and while disk space is cheap, knowledge is not. I'm just a stickler for not including useless crap in program packages, so I needed to know if these files were needed at runtime. Thanks to all for your help.