note cheekuperl I am not sure about what exactly you are trying to achieve. However, your statement <br> <i>According to perldoc, "exists" receives and "EXPR". </i> <br> seems only half correct. <br> See [perldoc://expr].<br> It says <br> <i>Note that the EXPR can be arbitrarily complicated as long as the final operation is a hash or array key lookup or subroutine name</i> 989548 989548