note extremely Best way, period, is: <code>use Storable qw(dclone); # Deep (recursive) cloning $cloneref = dclone($ref); </code> Keeping in mind it is shipped for free with any fairly modern perl installation (INST_FILE /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/i686-linux/Storable.pm) and is one of the more regularly "use"d modules in other modules. That means the perl-porters themselves have taken a modicum of interest in seeing that it is correct and complete. The likelyhood is, you already have [CPAN://Storable] installed! -- $you = new YOU; honk() if $you->love(perl) 89365 89365