First off, thank you (and everyone else) for taking the time to respond to my question. yes, indeed you are right. Merlyn did write an article about it (Web Techniques, Oct 1996). What confused/intimidated me was a line that said "Line 3 extends the built in library search path to include the location of my locally downloaded CPAN items". Please do not flame me for my ignorance. Installing LWP seemed to have several dependencies itself. If only the required libraries were listed, it would have been easier. I'm not looking to be spoonfed the answer, but these sorts of ambiguities make it easy for a task like to slide to the back burner.