I think you have and other's have me 'pegged' correctly. I am a Win/Mac guy attempting to learn Perl. Thanks for your advice. Also you provided an insight to a resource that I was not aware of: perldoc -f I wasn't even aware that it existed. I just found it on my system and now I've got lots of reading to do.
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).