note Sandy Ditto with all the rest of the replies, except... some strange behaviour. <br> Note that if your undefined variable is 1st in the string, no warning message.<p> The second print statement does <i>not</i> print a warning.<br> Mmmm.... <code> #!/usr/bin/perl -w my $a = 1; my $b = 2; my $c = 3; my $d = 4; my $e; print "$a $b $c $d $e\n"; print "$e $a $b $c $d\n"; </code> My guess is that it is the concatenation of a 'null' that causes the warning. <p><code>"$a $b"</code> is optimized to <code>$a." ".$b</code> according to the message I get when I use the 'use diagnostics' with this code. 313774 313774