bart, I scored this out because I found this worked when I tried it. I wanted to do some further digging, which I didn't get round to yesterday due to being very busy. I rarely code on Windows and was surprised this worked, as I'm used to the 'case counts' mentality. While I stand by this mentality (as you rightly say, it's a good habit to get into) I wanted to take the time to investigate if I'd done anything wrong in my test, or if perl as actually working as I expected on my windows laptop. Thanks.