Fair enough, I lost my rag with the voter here and probably deserved to be voted down on my reply to his vote, but I was annoyed at the swift rejection of my first major perl effort

As I've also said over there, it might have changed my response somewhat if you'd actually *said* it was your first major effort and you'd like some gentle feedback. You just put the code up, so I commented on how it could be simpler. FWIW I thought my response was fairly constructive - seeing as how I gave a complete version of the script, rather than just a "You're doing too much work here!"

And, for the record, you didn't reply to my vote - I didn't actually vote on that node at all! (I was still level 1 at the time) - someone else downvoted you - not me.

Tony