note toolic <blockquote><i> Can someone tell me if these two scripts will produce the EXACT same results? </i></blockquote> You can determine if the output is identical yourself by using [man://diff]: <c> orig.pl > out1 mod.pl > out2 diff out1 out2 </c> <p>See also: <ul> <li>Read [id://17558], then modify your post, using code tags. <li>[mod://perltidy] is a way to automate coed layout (whitespace). </ul> <p>UPDATE: from [doc://perlsyn]: <blockquote> Perl is a free-form language: you can format and indent it however you like. Whitespace serves mostly to separate tokens, unlike languages like Python where it is an important part of the syntax, or Fortran where it is immaterial. </blockquote> 996700 996700