note kennethk I cannot not recover your issue. If I run the code provided (after adding <c>use Carp 'cluck';</c>, <c>my $job_type = 65;</c>, and a closing quote on your line 4, I get the output on STDERR: <c>business_unit: at fluff.pl line 7 business_unit: D at fluff.pl line 7 business_unit: D at fluff.pl line 7</c> I suspect your issue is that what you actually mean to have is something like <c>use strict; use Carp 'cluck'; my $job_type = 65; my %bj = (64,'D', 128,'A', 256,'H'); foreach my $flag (keys %bj) { if ($flag & $job_type) { my $bu = $bj{$flag}; cluck("business_unit: $bu"); } }</c> <p>The difference here is that I am now only outputting when the if condition is true; your <c>if</c> applied only to the assignment, not the <c>cluck</c>. <p><b>Update</b>: [Jenda] also has a plausible explanation, if [id://975999] is correct. This makes sense if you are pulling the string out of <c>$cgi->param</c>, which contains only strings. You can numify the result using <c>my $job_type = 0+ $cgi->param('job');</c>, for whatever those variables are called locally. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-712372"> <hr /> <p>#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.</p> </div></div> 975971 975971