note repellent I was referring to <i>being wary</i> when <c>$line=<FH></c> is used on its own. To illustrate:<br> <c> $ perl -e 'print "with_ending\nno_ending"' > a.txt $ perl -MData::Dumper open(FH, "<", "a.txt") or die $!; my $line1 = <FH>; my $line2 = <FH>; my $line3 = <FH>; close FH; $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1; print Dumper [$line1, $line2, $line3]; __END__ $VAR1 = [ "with_ending\n", "no_end", undef ]; </c> <br> We see that there is a possibility that a line read (<c>$line3</c> in this case) may return <c>undef</c>. That's what I meant: we need to be wary that a line read will not always return defined.<br> 853652 853691