Thanks all for the various replies. I had forgotten about -s. I wanted to avoid reading into an array of lines and joining them because since I only wanted a scalar anyway, it seemd like unnecessary overhead. And if I process a file with line endings other than the platform line ending, I'd only get one "line" anyway. Jim -- Jim Correia Bare Bones Software, Inc. correia@barebones.com <http://web.barebones.com> # ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list? # ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org