@ikegami, I opted to use the open file handle to both open the file and/or create it if it doesn't exist. I seem to have irritated a few people when posting for help the first time and not including that line.
@javafan, I'm a newb so I don't really know all the benefits of each software package. Having said that, I gravitated towards Perl because of it's inherent regular expressions capabilities. I'm still working on Learning Perl (Schwartz) but hope to eventually make my way to CGI. Are there more efficient programming languages that I should be aware of?
@jethro, great advice!! Will keep in mind.