I am on WIN32. I want to check my a couple times of day IP and send it to my address at work. for some reason, this isn't working as intended. the if loop anyway i added the length and the string is coming back length zero @ifRaw = `ipconfig`; ($Rest, $IP ) = split (/:/, $ifRaw[13] ); #replace any leading white space from IP address $IP =~ s/^\s+//gm; #print "IP address: $IP"; $ifile = 'ip.res'; $ofile = 'ip.res.tmp'; #open input file open(INPUT, "$ifile") or die "Cannot open $ifile $!"; #open input file open(OUT, ">$ofile") or die "Cannot open $ofile $!"; #arguments for sytem call later @args= ("move", "$ofile", "$ifile"); while(<INPUT>) { chomp($IPline = $_); $IPline =~ s/^\s+//gm; print "\nip from file: \n$IPline\n"; print "length is: ", length("$IPfile"); print "\n"; print "\nip from program: \n$IP\n\n"; print "length is: ", length("$IP"); print "\n"; if ($IPline ne $IP) { print "The two IP addresses don't match\n"; print "creating new output file\n"; print OUT $IP; close(OUT); close(INPUT); system(@args); print "moved $ofile to $ifile\n\n"; } else { #they match. send current line close(OUT); close(INPUT); print "They match. Constructing mail."; } } Thanks in advance M rest of mail routine here..