note broomduster <blockquote><i> That dual use is why I prefer an explicit glob() over the diamond.. </i></blockquote> And so do I ;-)... In fact, just last week at $DAYJOB, I had an interesting "discussion" with $COWORKER who is relatively new to Perl and <i>insisted</i> that <ul> <li><c>while ( <> )</c></li> <li><c>while ( <file*> )</c></li> <li><c>while ( <@ARGV> )</c></li> </ul> all do the same thing. When $COWORKER was confronted with examples of the differences, the "problem" morphed first into "a bug in Perl", then to "incorrect documentation", then to "<i>should</i> do the same thing" (I guess that's progress :-) ). All of which is a long (and hopefully slightly humorous) explanation of why I should have caught what you were saying the first time. 714601 714712