Thanks for the additional code and such guys. I've come to see there's quite a few different ways of accomplishing the same thing!

I'm working with arrays now rather than hashes, and a mis-coding on my part showed that I may not even need arrays for some thimgs, simple variables seem to capture the data too!

I'm working now on capturing output from different short scripts, and it seems that rather than call other scripts, its best to do everything possible from a single perl script. Using strict and warnings is forcing me to do a fair amount of reading, which is helpful. Thanks again to everyone!