Cool! I've never used the "multi-argument" form of system(). I will definitely give that a go. Yes, line 407 is indeed:

$error = system("$gzipLoc $dupeDir/$logFile");

$gzipLoc = 'which gzip', which is not pretty, but I need to run on Solaris 2.6 and 9, and they put gzip in different places.

So far, the print statements have shown me exactly what I thought I'd see (no problems), but I don't have one after every line yet, so I'm sure it's in there somewhere. :->

Thank you for a very helpful piece of your mind and time.