So I've installed ActiveState perl 5.8 on my win laptop, apparently some people find it useful occasionally :). What would be really nice now is a pointer to useful sites for utter newbies, so I don't keep running into path conflicts with the perl that Oracle installs, so i can figure out how it all hangs together - that sort of stuff. -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l