C:\MinGW\source>perl qq2.pl $VAR1 = bless( \*Symbol::GEN0, 'Net::NNTP' ); $VAR2 = 3.205 Line ', '| ', '| A sequence of zero or more non- <newline>s plus a terminating ', '| <newline>. ', ' ', 'And "text file" as: ', ' ', '| 3.392 Text File ', '| ', '| A file that contains characters organized into one or more lines. T he ', '| lines do not contain NUL characters and none can exceed {LINE_MAX} ', '| bytes in length, including the <newline>. Although IEEE Std ', '| 1003.1-2001 does not distinguish between text files and binary file s ', '| (see the ISO C standard), many utilities only produce predictable o r ', '| meaningful output when operating on text files. The standard utilit ies ', '| that have such restrictions always specify "text files" in their ST DIN ', '| or INPUT FILES sections. ', ' ', 'Sinan already mentioned the C standard, but that doesn\'t specify how ', 'files are represented on disk - a text file could be a series of fixe d ', 'or variable length records without any "newline characters" at all, a s ', 'long as the stdio library performs the necessary conversions. ', ' ', ' hp ' ; C:\MinGW\source> #end output Thanks for your reply. I've used Data::Dumper before with some success but was dismayed to see the above output, where I can't even begin to guess where it went wrong. Gosh, I'd continue with this except that this is already a mess, from a continuity point of view.