I thought I was clear enough that I wanted to write a script with menu options a,b,c, etc. and get the user input from a command line, but obviously I was not. I'll tell you what I did. I displayed a menu with 5 options in vim and prompted for user input. My boss said I should consider using command line so we could run the script from anywhere. Let me know if there is any other info I might be missing. Thanks for your patience. I'm a newbie with perl.