Since some have already departed from the regex constraint, here's my offering: use Socket; /^[\d.]+$/&&defined inet_aton$_; (The leading regex is there to prevent a false positive when $_ is a resolvable domain name.) This may not be as much fun as others, but it has the more boring virtue of allowing legal addresses like 4294967295 127.1 Michael ==== Want to unsubscribe from Fun With Perl? Well, if you insist... ==== Send email to <fwp-request@technofile.org> with message _body_ ==== unsubscribe