Again, the beautiful thing about perl is that there can be many different ways to do the same thing simply and elegantly. Thanks to all for the quick help!!

This is pretty much the code what I was looking at, though I need to learn to use "join" as beatnik pointed out above.

The final version for me, unless someone gives me a compelling reason to use "join".

my @seed=('a'..'z',2..9);
my $rand='';
foreach(0..7){
  $rand.=$seed[rand(@seed)];
}
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