Thanks for your suggestion.

I will try your code shortly.

To better clarify my question: I am on unix, and the perl statemt will appear inside a ksh script that I am writing to analyze the contents of large files.

The statememt I supplied in the question is responsible to build the file by using the index file and assembling all of the data from the incoming file into the output file, and have these pieces of info returned to me also.

This seems to work properly.

What I am asking was the possibility to tag on some additional code that would tally the various counters I am interested in during the building of the output file.

I hope this makes my question a bit clearer.

Thanks.