I did finally get the grep to work as expected thanos1983, again, like I mentioned above, I'm begining to think my environment for perl is causing gremlins, I may fire up an old windows xp machine by itself to do my testing on, I'm begining to think the virtual machine's limitations are being exceeded... previously correct/good/executable lines in my code that worked before I kept adding more script are starting to throw errors... thanx again everyone for your guidance, maybe someday I can actually help someone else *heh*