Thanks for your assistance folks, and this thread was accidently duplicated...they are playing with new security "features" around here and it took all day for me to get the question posted, the site kept timing out, so in amongst the time outs, one of em must have made it in and I didnt know it...I dont know who can clean it up, but either this one or the other thread can be removed.
just putting STDIN in a while loop did the trick, I have by far a lower level of knowledge of perl than some of the brains around here, so I was totally focused on the array and then doing a foreach loop rather than a while loop.
Thanks again!