Hello Bill,

> >1. what is "@_"     ?
>
> That has two meanings.  First, it's what you say when you bang you toe in
> the middle of the night.  

 ;-)  Yes.  I was just thinking it looked suspiciously like some sort of 
special function rather than just an ordinary array.  I have come to look at 
pairs of letters with some suspicion and for some reason looked past this 
meaning.  Nevermind. Thanks & thanks too for your clear explanations on my 
other perl-related questions.  Very helpful indeed.

> In short, it looks like the original code had:
>
>  $pattern = $input{'l'}
>
> So, you would probably want something like:
>
>   my @stuff = makewordlist(  $input{'l'} );

It still needed the path to swish in the line & in the end I've found 
that the following line gets the script kicking along nicely:

my @stuff = makewordlist( shift || $pattern,  $swish );

Cheers,

Andrew Lord