Hi again: I am still not sure why my program is not exiting the loop, but I ran into another problem. When I pass my script command line arguments, I should be able to use @ARGV to access them. However, $ARGV[0] holds all elements, not just the first one, so I cannot use the array to get anything. I am not sure why this is happening. How can I use the @ARGV array to get a list of all command line arguments passed to a perl script? Does perl parse arguments on something special, not just white space? -- Have a great day, Alex My email is now: mehgcap@xxxxxxxxx __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind