The reason the 0 worked was because split was not finding anything to split on, except for that "10 minutes" line-- it was reading the 0 as the delimiter. If I had picked another character that could never appear in any line of my text file, I would have gotten the same result-- but not because I was doing anything right. I'll stop making sh*t up, davido. And eric256's right-- if I want the whole line, why not just say so?

Thanks to you both. I'll get back to my penance now.

Pax,

NovMonk