volks,
it's crisis time in uncle drieux's neighborhood, so that I could simplify the code maintenance I opted to use a variable inside another loop that is based upon the Max index value of the keys in %decrHash - all of which are ints.... # # what we use so we do not have to change the code below # my $decrCount=0; # # one way to implement 'get Max Index' # for ( keys %decrHash ) { $decrCount = $_ if ( $_ > $decrCount) ;} the other one liner would look like: my ($decrCount) = sort { $b <=> $a } keys %decrHash; I really wanted to do that with a 'shift' on the list returned by sort - but it whined at me and I told it to go away and just opted to list context the $decrCount, and throw away the rest of the data..... now I want to do which one of these for what reason again???? ciao drieux --- OH MY GOD, THE CLOSING CURLY BRACE IS WINKING AT ME AGAIN.... Make it STOP! Make It STOP! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]