For some problems, recursion can be more elegant. For some other problems, it's just another way to do the job. For the remaining few problems, it's just a harder way to do things.

In fact, for this problem, it may be that recursion could be more elegant. My implementation, however, makes no such claim! Especially as you've made a few improvements! 8^)

(In Perl, I'm not very skilled (yet), so you'd be agog at how much time I spent debugging it before posting. I was happy enough to get it done! Once there, I was afraid to touch it in persuit of elegance. We need to get a good golfer in here for that...)

Regarding the altering of the search process: I'd imagine that you may be able to get there with a recursive solution, as well--not that one comes to mind for this task!

I've been meaning to beat Lisp into my brain, but after learning a few programming languages, I've adopted the policy: No learning a new language until I get paid for it! It's too bad I can't convince my boss to let me write anything in Lisp..... So, I'm trying to learn some Lisp-like Perl idioms, but I've got quite a way to go!

--roboticus