I have found this testing harness to be very helpful. Perhaps this will help you understand options better than just a snippet as this incorprates many options... HTH! Bill A. -----Original Message----- From: M z [mailto:kpslater777@yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 10:26 AM To: beginners@perl.org Subject: creating custom switches in my program? Hello I was looking into documentation on the getopts module, but was having some difficulty understanding how to implement it. The scope of my problem is quite simple, actually. can someone help me create a snippet where if no argument is specified at the command line, than the output is written out to the input file, and if an option is given (say -d) at the comment line, the program subsequently prompts the user for the destination to write to? thanks, I think this is easier than I'm making it out to be, but I have no experience implementing the getopts module. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/Thread Previous