note sierrathedog04 I would define "baby Perl" as any Perl that one can write using only the constructs set forth in the first chapter of Merlyn (Randal L. Schwartz)'s estimable Lhama book "Learning Perl." Thus, one could use print, if, chomp, <STDIN>and even qw and tr but not grep, map, hashes, typeglobs, references and the flipflop operator. <p> I say, if you know baby Perl, you can do almost anything, just as if you know a thousand words of French and the present tense conjugations of verbs you can get by in Paris. 80620 80680