note Utilitarian ICL VME, &gt;shudder&lt;that brings back memories...<br/> $ARGV[0] is the first paramter supplied to your script.<br/> When you have to parse a common file format, the first response should be to search CPAN (or for a faster response, metacpan.org)for the format, there you will discover [mod://Text::CSV] a module which handles all the edge cases that may arise in your data.<p> Welcome to Perl, you'll find it much handier to script in than scl once you get the hang of it...<p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-681898"> <c>print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."</c> </div></div> 1007712 1007712