Need to show my stupidity here, gotta ask ... the code below is the lower half of the cleanly aligned code you offered earlier (thanks again there!). Pgm runs, but no output. So, I began tinkering with my REGEX to no avail. Now I'm looking at the code and here's what my feeble mind sees .... first, we set $/ (the delimiter) to </DOCUMENT>. Thus, we should process data until we discover this delimiter, at which point we write the data to disk, then begin processing anything after </DOCUMENT> up until the next occurrence of </DOCUMENT>. Is that right? If so, then as a diagnostic tool, should I be able to print (to the screen) the contents of the data between the delimiters? If so, which variable will contain this data? Sorry for the neophyte-like questions. Thank you. UPDATE: Withdrawn, problem solved. Sorry!

open my $FH_IN, '<',$files_dir.'/'.$filename or die "Can't open $filen
+ame <:$!>";
    use Cwd; print getcwd(), "\n";

    $/="</DOCUMENT>";

    while (my $doc = <$FH_IN>) {

       if ($doc =~ m/^\s*<FILENAME>\s*(.*)(ex21)\s*(.*)(<\/TEXT)\s*(.*
+)/igm    ||
           $doc =~ m/^\s*<FILENAME>\s*(.*)(EX\-21)\s*(.*)(<\/TEXT)\s*(
+.*)/igm )
            {
           $htm=join('',$1);
            print $htm;
            print $FH_OUT "$htm\n";
        }
    }
    close $FH_IN;
}
close($FH_OUT);
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