I know you are trying to help, but we like to teach fishing instead of simply giving away fish. Corion does an excellent job of teaching fishing (Re: Open a file) with immediate positive results (Re^2: Open a file) which will help liljohn many times in the future. This lesson is teaching the importance of writing good diagnostics into the code which can be used in many different ways and is a great lesson in Perl laziness (do it right the first time).