note stefan k Hi all,<br> a few notes on the replies <ul> <li><em>GLOB_ERROR</em> ... Of course I read the perldoc and I tried to use GLOB_ERROR. Unfortunately it is <em>not</em> set to a value other than zero when the globbing produced no result. When I introduce a <code>print Dumper(GLOB_ERROR) </code> after each call to <code>bsd_glob</code> it shows '0' in every case. <li><em>$! is not reset</em> ... Right, it would be quite counterintuitive if it were reset. That was a stupid assumption of mine. But then, why <em>is</em> it reset with <code>$pat4</code> in the above example?? <li>As to chromatics question: Nah, I may be stupid but it's not that bad ;-) This is not real world code it's just me trying to boil the problem down to some small example. You are right, that I should have swapped the lines dumping the list and dumping <code>$!</code> </ul> I am still trying to get this working. Any more pointers? <p> Following an old rule o' thumb: there must be something very dumb in my thinking or in my code, taking into account the amount of time I have already spent with this problem ;-) <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-5094"> <p> <table width="80%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td><small>Regards...</small></td> <td align="right"><small> <a href="http://www.skamphausen.de">stefan k</a> </small></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="center"> <small>you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion</small> </td> </tr> </table> </div></div> 575380 575382