A nice explination...this and everyone else's has helped me a lot...thanks! As I understand lexical variables, they would be the same as not passing a variable back into the programme from a subroutine in, say, BASIC, right? It just remains inside whatever sub or block and isn't global? But in this case, to allow it to be global, I simply leave of the my? Just making sure I have things straight. Also...the way I had it chomp above doesn't seem to work...Can someone explain why not?