My apologies... I must have misread something. I just went through my Perl books and couldn't find anything. There was SOME reference to preferring single quoted strings over double quoted strings. But I can't find it... I think I may have imagined my own reasons for doing this: "oh, single quoted strings don't have to find the values of variables" Well, shoot, here I was going through and changing my doubles to singles thinking I was getting huge time savings