Thanks for your input. I do know that a sub with no explicit return, it could create some unexpected return value. The subroutine is supposed to make changes to global hashes and I am not really relying on the return, so I am not too bothered by it. The  $count variable is a global in this case and I want to count all lines in the files. I made a few pretty drastic changes today, and I will continue to do that as I learn more stuff. One of the things I did was to reduce the number of global variables. I hope to eliminate global variables after I read what you suggested.