You link to a discussion of permutations but the original poster requested combinations and it appears to me that the code here does find combinations (though I didn't fully digest the code so I could be wrong). Update: But actually running the code (modified so that I don't need the mentioned module) shows that it is finding permutations. *sigh* (:

Confusion between these two is not uncommon. See (tye)Re: Permutations for another instance and a bit of explanation of how to tell the two apart.

Thanks for the input, and yes my misguidedness did mean to say permutations. I tried your permutations sub and that did speed up the program a small ammount. It turns out that Algorithm::Permute is much faster than them both so I'm using that now instead. Thanks.