Dear johngg and dsheroh,

I do not usually critique the answers of other monks ( unless I think it is wrong :-), since thanks to Perl we have many ways of doing the same thing. When I stated 'OP', I was referring to:

OP  Original Poster  The author of the top level node
                     of the thread in which it appears.
[download]

My confusion is that johngg was critiquing my answer to the Original Poster (OP) and I didn't even look at the answer johngg supplied. When I used the word 'trivial', I was referring to the OP's problem and script and not to any monk's comments.

As for my use of 'exists', I benchmarked on Perl 5.12.2 that 'exists' was faster at checking keys than working on the values of the keys ( $h{$key}++; ). In johngg script, the way he uses the incrementing in his script, it may be faster.

Let's not have a flame war over my mis-understanding!

Best Regards...Ed