turns out, it's because the newbid is hysterical.

sigh. i turned on tracing, after trying Pg and some other suggs, and the tracing showed me that there was a SECOND query in the perl code, which is a lot later in the file. that one, obviously, is munged. i can print the values returned from the query i posted. it was never the problem. sorr

turns out, it's '

-- Jay Scott 512-835-3553[EMAIL PROTECTED] Head of Sun Support, Sr. Operating Systems Specialist Applied Research Labs, Computer Science Div. S224 University of Texas at Austin