hmmm, the 'magical' <> operator is perplexing me, why won't it work on a file handle? and..ahh, okay, so basically all tests are done with $_, but you can change this to $anything to symbolize a line, then print $line back out in the loop and the whole line gets clobbered? Thank you soo much, this code example really cleared things up, but i still wish i could use file handles.. Just what is going on with that @ARGV ? Thanks again everyone. -malloc