GoForIt, I'm glad that you got some help from this thread and are able to proceed with your program! Hurray!

This @ARGV business just means that this is a reserved array for Perl and normally you shouldn't assign to it or grow it by a push or whatever. I've never seen a 'C' or Perl program that did that, but of course "never" is a very long time!

Perl normally "consumes" items from @ARGV via shift. The equivalent analog in 'C' is argv++. Getopts essentially works this way. Both of these operations make @ARGV smaller. There are also analogous operations that can consume the "rightmost" argument from the command line.

JavaFan and I are probably in what I would call "aggressive agreement" - there isn't any real difference except that somehow the words via text seem to be in juxtaposition.