note tilly D'oh. Thanks for pointing out my obvious typo. That is what I get for posting late at night without testing my code.<p> What I consider the most important point here is not that lists and arrays differ. Rather it is that there are a lot of ways in which scalar and array context can have unexpected behaviour, and there are a lot of hidden mines awaiting the person who does not think about which is which.<P> Being aware of the context and making a point of consistently exploring it will teach you a lot of nuances of code.<P> BTW I am no longer bitten by the difference between lists and arrays. There was a period when I realized that Perl really is list-oriented and I tried to make my code be list-oriented and I got bitten during the transitition... 26319 26326