folks allow me, Im the other newbie who was grappling with Apache::NavBar the other day :-) Ged will be proud, I persevered as he advised ;-) Sam new to perl, welcome. This maynot be the canonically right answer but for a simple task like youre asking, you can just "warn" stuff to your error logs. so for example, (if I understood your initial request correctly) , this piece of code will show you the line you are reading from your configuration file and then the url,location match if any. while (<$fh>) { chomp; s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; #fold leading and trailing whitespace next if /^#/ || /^$/; # skip comments and empty lines next unless my($url, $label) = /^(\S+)\s+(.+)/; warn "here is the line $_\n"; if ( my($url,$label) = /^(\S+)\s+(.+)/ ) { warn "here are the matches $url, $label\n"; } else { next; } push @c, $url; # keep the url in an ordered array $c{$url} = $label; # keep its label in a hash } __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/