I really appreciate the responses from all three of you, especially given I didn't provide much info. It sounds plausible to me what you are suggesting and I will try and test it out when I have chance. I have managed to bodge my way round it a bit by another very crude (I have much to learn!) script that reads all the files (using type command) and then outputs to a .new version. When I run the .new version with my original script it works fine.

I do hope to get to the bottom of this in a more intelligent fashion, so I will try out the suggestions.

OS: Win XP
Perl v5.8.8

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