note tadman You must've not only removed the <TT>my</TT>, but the brackets as well. It was the brackets, mind you, that are the key here. <BR> <BR> Including brackets means that you're assigning a list to a list, in this case, the result of the <TT>grep</TT> operation into a list containing the variable <TT>$ok</TT>. Thus, the first thing grepped goes into the first variable, and you get "Some String". <BR> <BR> If you want to know how many things you got, you need to force a list to scalar conversion. That might sound fancy, but it's just a way of saying you want to assign the list directly to the variable instead of to a list of variables. No brackets. If you're a bit fuzzy, here's some examples; <BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>my @list = ("A","B","C"); my ($var) = @list; # $var becomes "A" my $var = @list; # $var becomes 3 my ($var) = scalar(@list); # $var becomes 3 my $var = scalar(@list); # $var becomes 3 (same idea) </CODE></BLOCKQUOTE> 301561 301561