This is a classic example of the admonition, "Never trust data."
I did try the following: David Precious writes: > change "system" to "print" to print out the command that would be run, > and (a) you'll likely see the problem, or (b) you can try running that > exact command. I had tried echo as the system() command and I thought it was okay but after a night's sleep and trying the print command as suggested, the problem was obvious. I had gotten $filename from the following code snippet: foreach $keyfile (@filenames) { #Checking this key file. $kpath = $keyfile; ( $filename, $directories, $suffix ) = fileparse($kpath); I went on to use $filename without making sure it was clean. It has an embedded newline at the end and chomp($filename); fixed everything. The temporary print statement showed the 1 line becoming 2 and a trace of $filename in perl -d clearly showed the newline. I feel embarrassed for wasting everybody's time, but I really appreciate the help. Martin -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/