Got it. Simple. That'll save me quite a few lines. That's the solution for me.

I'm sure I tried something similar, but without the ||{} it was getting an undef reference, which obviously doesn't work.

Anonymous Monk suggests that my use of local was killing my pointer idea it seems.

Out of curiosity, since I looked all over the Perl docs perlsyn, perlvar, etc. Where is the *pointer-thing documented?

Cheers!