Thanks for the links to diagnostics and to strict ... and the typo in the code.

I'm still very confused, however, on why this code doesn't work with the for loop. If I comment out the two lines  for ($loop=0;$loop<=3;$loop++){ and the closing bracket } the code works fine. It seems the only problem is in the for loop statement.

I can't see my diagnostics ... I assume because I'm running my perl programs via the web where I just get an internal error banner when the program crashes. How do I go about seeing the diagnostics output in this case? Currently what I do to check to see if the program works is to upload it to the server and then run it by going to its url and refreshing the browser. Do you know how I could get the diagnostics to print out? cdherold