Thank you to everyone who helped out with my questions and directing me to the proper references. Thanks Matt for the pipe tip too.
brian > > Are backticks bad, and if so what are the alternatives if I need to > return information to a variable? They're not as "cross platform" as using pure Perl, but that's not always possible (or at least easy) so sometimes it's "better" to use the backticks. A similar approach I would suggest is to try a pipe. It's very slick - it'll scale well if the command were going to return many values. #Syntax not checked... open (FILEHANDLE, "ph email = [EMAIL PROTECTED] return name |") or die "couldn't fork" ; while (<FILEHANDLE>) { do commands here; Matt -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]