I am sorry if I am wrong, but it sounds like your only interest in Perl is a solution to yesterday's problem. If so, you probably have come to the wrong place. We are here to help you solve it yourself. You received two good answers. The first was the terse one-line program you have repeated here along with a link to the documentation needed to understand it. Once you understand it, you should be able to adapt it to your needs without executing perl from within perl. (Did you notice that it omits the final ');'? ) The other answer is much longer, but easier to understand. You may even be able to cut and paste the parts that you need.