Three word magic! Three words written by you are more impacting than the entire two big paragraphs written in the previous posts! Thanks!!

That is sad, those previous paragraphs really aren't big, and there is no magic involved, merely the basics (addition/subtraction). If I were you I would read Perl documentation documentation, Searching Perl Documentation, How to Read Perldocs, all part of Tutorials sections Understanding and Using PerlMonks, Getting Started with Perl, http://perldoc.perl.org/index-functions-by-cat.html#Functions-for-SCALARs-or-strings