Don't worry about me, I didn't test-run your code using live pathological filename specimens :).

But I'm slightly more worried about the opener.

Maybe we were enjoying Perl a bit too much: While there certainly is enough stuff for meditation and keywords to lookup to answer to the faithful, we have buried the answers a bit deeper than necessary for mere homework-copy-paste-reply evasion.

But then I'm telling myself that the affc will ask more specific questions and show his own code, after he _did_ meditate and check the keywords from mickep76's recursion hint onward.

cu
Peter

Update: Just found this one via RAT: id:/501932, which is a nice variation of the topic.