Please understand. I have read your reply and will certainly read the releavant documents pertaining to mark up, prior to sending any additional information. You are quite correct in seeing that I am not a Perl Professional. What you need to know is that I wrote the entire application from scratch myself with self taught Perl. I had many stumbling blocks and was able to get over these by help from the internet at large. I DO know the code I am running, while I will be the first to admit, that alot of what I am doing I do NOT completely understand. I have been programming for over 40 years in everything from assembly language to 4GL languages. I am a recognized expert on SAS and have been on numerous panels. I have held director level software development positions. I mention these only because of your challenging my expertise. I truly need assistance with Perl in its intraciacy going foreward and I thought I had stumbled on a great site, but I guess you have to be born knowing everything before you can dare to ask for help. I have alot to give and only asked for help. I apologize for any mis-appropriations of your time but I will be monitoring the site to see where I can be of assistance, mostly in SAS, but I have written alot of Perl hands off automation processes using Oracle. By the way, you are right, again, I did not mention the database I am using, it is MYSQL. Thanks for your time.