Oh... I guess this is the new thing I learned today. This works: $ perl -e 'print join "", 1..4' 1234 And I thought this would work too: $ perl -e 'print join "", 4..1' Nope. 4..1 isn't a 4 integer series. I thought it was. I guess I'll switch to "reverse 1..4". I thought ".." worked on any ASCII series, forward or backward. I guess it only works forward. j