Um, I'm on linux, but I'm trying to do something similar in perl, since I have a bunch of pattern matching to do that isn't in the problem example.

Problem with narrowing down a problem is that I throw out other reasons why things were done a certain way, I see it with others "answering"sic people's questions too -- instead of answering the problem, the try to tell the person they should do it a different way -- which is fine in some cases, but about 1/3 the time (or most the time w/my questions), it's because something I'm trying in a larger program isn't working and I've tried to isolate a smaller test case.

I'm assume anyone who has tried to run it gets the same result, so it's not just my version of perl. So it's just something weird I'm just not seeing that I'll probably feel real dumb for doing once it's out in the open, but for now, I'd like to find my mistake...