If you post your code then we (the Perl Monks) can help in a more perlish way. But, from what the error messages you have posted say; you may not be using semi-colons on lines 3, 7, and 8.

In my experience with Perl, from the command line you have to type "c:\perl program_name" to make it execute (this in in windows). In UNIX you can execute it if the path to Perl is in you liberary search path. Then you can execute it by using "./program_name", if you are in that directory.

What OS are you writing this perl script in? And please post your code as well.

curtisb -- "trying to help"