JavaFan,

Originally, I did look at the post quickly, and you are correct that 'quotemeta' would not help. Since there was no output shown, I thought incorrectly that maybe the code was getting into a regex problem with special characters.

After your response, I took the time to download the code onto a Samba share, login to that machine, and then ftp the 12 lines of code to the machine that I was working on, so that I could see what was going on. I added some code to call the sub and then realized he was calling the sub with null('') but it still worked for me( returned null('') ). I couldn't get the 'split' to return 'undef' but that could be OS or Perl version related.

But I didn't notice I was first, which would be very rare for me anyway!

So is it somehow better to be first?