Dear anonymous monk

Please specify perl version and platform/OS when posting "works for me". It is not very helpful to an OP to know that his code works "somewhere, out there". Very often problems like these are platform specific (as the next reply illustrated).

Learning requires that people feel free to ask questions that may seem "dumb" to others. Although I'm sure your intentions were all the best, a curt "it works for me" without qualification of perl version and OS, may in fact come across as dismissive, as in "it works for me, so the problem must be you.".