<dblack / candle.superlink.net> wrote in message news:Pine.LNX.4.44.0210211942110.25814-100000 / candle.superlink.net... <snip> "or fail" won't work the way "or die" does in Perl; you need to > rescue, because you're catching an exception (not just branching on a > false return value). Something like: > > f = File.open("blah") rescue fail "That did not work" > Will that actually work? All the docs (pickaxe, nutshell) I have read all show it in a begin/end statment. Is there another tome I am needing? Bob