note ant9000 I find your explanations nice and clear; maybe you could also append the output of your scripts, just to make your points even easier to grasp.<br> A note about <code>local</code>: it's real use is for temporarily overwriting Perl's automatic variables, which cannot be redeclared as lexicals, for instance<br> <code> #here $/ is usually a newline (on Unix, at least) { #localize the input record separator and undefine it local $/=undef; #now reading from STDIN yelds the entire contents at once my $whole_file=<>; #do what you like with lexical $whole_file #... } #here $/ is restored back to its original value </code> 95813 95813