> if ($line1 =~ /^#\(.*\)/) When you put a \ before an special character, like (, this special character losts its special behaviour. So, in your regex, the bracket acts as a normal character and the regex looks for something that contains brackets.
If you want to capture the substring after the #, your regex should be something like this /^#(.*)/ HTH Eva -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
